Chicago Policy vs. Council Politics

It’s election day morning, you perform your due diligence on candidates, get up before work to reach the polls, and minutes later, proudly don the “I voted” sticker as a mark of commitment to your civic duty. But wait…what if someone told you that your vote has no realistic influence over the selection of a candidate? That’s what gerrymandering tells you.

Gerrymandering is the manipulation of the borders of a constituency to favor a certain party’s electoral outcome or dilute the voting power of a particular group. Through gerrymandering, your community’s vote can either be strategically split into several districts or oddly congregated into one with a supermajority, leaving your community with less representation than it would receive without such results-motivated drawing of district boundaries. Although gerrymandering based on race is unconstitutional, partisan gerrymandering is considered non-justiciable by the federal courts. This lack of regulation opens the floodgates of political creativity in the map redrawing process and helps cement the hold on power of the majority incumbent party.

The vote dilution and incumbency protection that come along with gerrymandering are an affront to democracy and fairness. Occasional redistricting itself is unavoidable, it is necessitated by populations shifts – but redistricting could be protected against partisan gerrymandering. Instead of incumbent politicians, maybe those doing the redistricting could constitute a non-partisan independent body or a neutrally programmed computer? Or maybe both?

While it is easy to get lost in the complexities of an ideal redistricting process, advanced mapping technologies have a record of producing electoral districts that are free of biases and are more representative of society. These technological tools can be combined with a non-partisan commission that could keep an eye out to avoid maps that inadvertently overlook hard-to-quantify aspects of human communities, such as the desirability of retaining the electoral unification of traditional communities.

Recently, several states, including California and Michigan, have introduced independent commissions with membership limited to people who meet a strict criterion for non-partisanship, to shield redistricting from political manipulations. Even large cities such as New Orleans have their redistricting process supported by advanced mapping technology and Geographic Information Systems.

Will these trends ever come to Chicago? Unfortunately, not anytime soon, it seems. Ward maps in Chicago are developed in a hyper-political process involving opaque City Council negotiations, and the resulting wards are often geographically strange. The neighborhood of Englewood, for example, has been multifurcated into five wards, while Lincoln Park, roughly similar in land area, comprises essentially one ward. Starting almost a year before the City Council finalized the redistricted map of the city, the Chicago Advisory Redistricting Commission, an independent body built by the nonpartisan non-profit organization Change Illinois, drew district boundaries in collaboration with Chicago residents and advanced technological mapping tools. The result was a draft map that could serve as a potential baseline for deliberation; however, the City Council approved its own internally drafted map.

So, the mission of divorcing partisan preferences from redistricting Chicago wards was not achieved in the aftermath of the 2020 census, even when the Council had several months to work with all the requisite information. The next redistricting is scheduled to happen in the wake of the 2030 census. Chicago has nearly a decade to set up a system that employs non-partisan redistricting.

Ten years is enough to overcome a lot of obstacles, though the interest in self-preservation by incumbent politicians might prove impregnable. But ten years is also long enough that no one knows who the incumbent politicians will be in 2032. With continued pressure from citizens and NGOs, along with growing national anti-gerrymandering sentiments, maybe the current incumbents can see the wisdom of adopting a process that will create a non-gerrymandered electoral map. And then Chicago voters in 2032 won’t hear that voice that lets them know that their vote has been devalued in advance.

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The Public Policy Studies major at the University of Chicago attracts scores of excellent undergraduate students. All of these students take part in a capstone experience in their senior year. A new option for the capstone experience is the Policy Project Seminar, a one-quarter course devoted to honing policy analysis and communication skills. The theme adopted for the inaugural Autumn 2022 Project Seminar was “Chicago Through a Policy Lens.” The Chicago Policy Review is pleased to present this op-ed as part of our “Outside Voices” series.