5/28/13
"Illinois is in terrible shape because of politicians who have run up debt, failed to ensure that there’s enough money to pay bills and made the state unappealing for businesses that might otherwise want to move here.
And those politicians keep getting re-elected. It’s almost impossible for an incumbent to lose. People are dissatisfied with their government, yet the same people get elected year after year.
It doesn’t make sense — unless you know how the game is played. It’s a game that’s rigged, but fortunately there are some reform-minded groups that want to bring fairness into the political arena.
CHANGE Illinois!, a nonpartisan group of civic, business, labor, professional, nonprofit and philanthropic organizations that represent more than 2 million members, is leading an effort to put an amendment on the November 2014 ballot to improve the way state legislative districts are drawn.
Every 10 years, legislative and congressional districts must be redrawn to represent shifts in population after the federal census. It’s been required since the U.S. Supreme Court’s “one person, one vote” decision in 1964. In that landmark case, the court required that legislative districts had to represent equal numbers of people. Every decade, districts were to be redrawn based on the new census results.
In Illinois, as in many states, the process has been mired in partisan politics. At the very beginning of “one person, one vote,” this state couldn’t agree on how to draw legislative districts, resulting in the infamous “bedsheet ballot” of 1964, in which all candidates for House and Senate had to run statewide.
When there was a split in political power, Democrats and Republicans hardly ever agreed on maps. The stalemates were broken by the secretary of state picking a sealed paper envelope out of Abraham Lincoln’s hat or from another container.
The party whose name was drawn got to draw the maps. The Democrats “won” after the 2000 census and didn’t need a hat after the 2010 census because they controlled the governor’s office and both chambers of the General Assembly.
After the 2011 redistricting process, incumbents won 97 percent of their general elections and there was no real competition in two-thirds of the state legislative races in Illinois.
Illinois’ system has the politicians picking the voters rather than the other way around. If the voters had real choices, more of them might show up at the polls and incumbents would not serve life sentences in office.
Good candidates are discouraged from running because they know the odds are against them. In some cases a less-qualified candidate will run, but more likely, the incumbent goes unchallenged.
Because the incumbents are virtually assured of winning, they don’t listen to us because they don’t need to.
It is time to give the power back to the people and to take redistricting out of the hands of the legislative leaders."
We couldn't agree more! You have another chance to make a better choice than Larry Walsh Jr. and Pat McGuire in 2014 and 2016!
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