Fair Political District Maps for Illinois
Maps are powerful and important! That's the caption of a slide in my standard "GIS for nonprofits" presentation, right around the part where I'm trying to teach why nonprofit organizations should care about maps. Maps aren't always used just to illustrate historical statistics or last year's data - they can also be used to visualize future plans and activities for our communities and our world... with both positive and negative implications. That's why I think the Illinois Fair Map Initiative's Fair Map Amendment is such an important issue.
Illinois residents (and Chicagoans specifically) are no strangers to, ahem, "interesting" political concepts and that includes the concept of "gerrymandering." Gerrymandering is the drawing of political districts to marginalize groups of people, giving one group an unfair advantage or disadvantage in political elections. Take a look at this map of the 4th Congressional District of Illinois, cited by The Economist as one of the most gerrymandered political districts in the United States.
Two large chunks of Chicago and the near suburbs, both happening to contain majority Hispanic populations, are connected by a thin, winding bit of property that just happens to overlap Interstate 294 several miles west of the city, skirting several communities with much lower Hispanic populations. By lumping as many voters as possible of a presumed political bias into a single district, gerrymandering can minimize the impact of that population's vote.
In Illinois, an initiative led by the League of Women Voters has formed to promote the Illinois Fair Map Amendment. This proposed amendment to the state's constitution would replace the current redistricting process - think smoky, backroom deals between legislators full of lobbyist influence - with an open and transparent process, led by a bipartisan commission and accountable to the people of the state.
Everyone deserves to have their vote count in fair and honest elections - and political district maps are a crucial part of ensuring the integrity of our electoral process.