Eye On Illinois: What defining traits make a political map fair?

What makes a fair map?

The inability to find a widely acceptable answer to that question complicates much ongoing debate as the first draft of Democrats’ new map of Illinois Congressional districts circulates.

I live in the current 10th Congressional district, which has a chunk taken out of the top to allow for the 14th to wrap around from McHenry County into Lake. Under the new map, the 10th is the least controversial of the 17, more or less occupying the state’s far northeastern corner.

The General Assembly districts approved earlier this year are a different story. My suburb of about 20,000 is split into three House districts. The high school district, with two schools of about 3,500 students total, takes in five. Our neighborhood elementary, enrollment around 300, is split over two Senate and House districts. Even village parks are bisected.

Odd shapes alone don’t make for unfair maps. Lines have to be drawn somewhere, and the city and suburbs are compact. Even school district boundaries — most drawn when many of today’s overcrowded subdivisions were farmland – can appear gerrymandered. In our last town the kids rode the bus about four miles west to their elementary instead of the one a mile north, which was in a different district, right behind the village hall where we voted.

Basing electoral districts on county borders would be impossible given wide variance of land mass and population densities among all 102. Illinois’ smallest county by area is Putnam, 160 square miles, population about 5,600. Largest is McLean: 1,183 square miles, population 170,000. Smallest by population are Hardin and Pope, each with fewer than 4,000 – but Hardin is 177 square miles and Pope is 368, more than twice as large.

Each Illinois Congressional district should have about 754,000 people. Only two counties are larger (Lake is 40,000 short). It takes dozens of tiny counties to round up that many people. Ideally the maps should respect as many boundaries as possible, yet there will always be disagreement on what limits are essential.

Because Illinois has so many layers of government, political maps will always cross some lines. Sure, lawmakers could amend the state Constitution so cities above a certain population line would always have to be fully contained inside a given district, but what’s the magic number? Could the same be done for school districts? Townships? Libraries?

Truly unpacking some of Illinois’ structural problems would involve the unthinkable step of redrawing all sorts of internal borders in the name of contiguity, an insurmountable nightmare for every taxing body.

The Democrats’ draft may well be gerrymandering. But they also likely satisfy enough criteria to survive a legal challenge – and little will change over the next decade.

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Media. Follow him on Twitter @sth749. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.