Gerrymandering: Madigan’s legacy of letting politicians choose their voters

Former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan’s sentencing to 7.5 years for bribery, conspiracy and wire fraud ends his active role in Illinois politics. But his legacy of gerrymandering will continue to shape Illinois politics long after he’s behind bars.

Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, the nation’s longest-serving legislative leader, may be gone away to spend 7.5 years in federal prison for corruption, but his rules for how political districts are shaped is still letting politicians put power first and voters second.

Madigan’s first political splash had nothing to do with a better state, jobs growth, welfare or public safety. It was about cartography.

Political mapmaking is how Madigan first took hold of a position he held for 36 of the 38 years before he left the state legislature: speaker of the House. It empowered Democratic lawmakers to choose their voters and political opponents for decades; they’re still doing so.

Illinois currently puts legislators in charge of drawing their own districts as well as districts for the U.S. House. This process of redesigning legislative maps each decade has allowed Democrat-majority lawmakers to reshape Illinois’ voting districts to best suit their needs while diluting the voting power of their Republican and independent opponents.

Madigan’s first foray into legislative mapmaking in 1981 provides a preview of the power and influence he would wield over Illinois policy and politicians for decades to come.

Many observers thought the 1980 census numbers would be a disaster for Illinois Democrats. A growing suburban population and an exodus from Chicago meant the city was entitled to no more than 15.5 Illinois Senate seats and 31 Illinois House seats.

But Madigan’s first 1981 map gave Chicago 19 Senate seats and 37 House seats. Many of those districts overlapped with the suburbs, diluting Republican votes.

And that wasn’t all: when a “cutback” amendment ratified by voters in 1980 axed 59 seats from the Illinois House, Madigan’s map ensured 43 of those vanishing seats belonged to the GOP.

Madigan’s mapmaking would keep Democratic majorities in the Illinois House and Senate for the next decade. Just two years later, House Democrats, many of whom would not have been in the Statehouse if not for Madigan’s map, elected him speaker.

There were challenges to Madigan’s mapmaking authority in 2010, 2014 and again in 2016. The last effort collected over 560,000 voter signatures and looked like Illinois would finally see independent maps for at least its legislative seats, but a Madigan-backed lawsuit challenged the ballot question.

Unsurprisingly, considering his conviction was for his corrupt relationship with ComEd, he used a ComEd lobbyist for that challenge – the same guy he used the quash the 2014 effort. Madigan won when the Illinois Supreme Court killed the 2016 effort and denied voters the chance to stop state lawmakers from drawing their own districts.

More recently after the 2020 census, Illinois lost a congressional district because of the shift of population. Even so, Democrats gained one favorable district while Republicans lost two districts.

The state’s two competitive districts from the previous cycle dropped to only one competitive district under the current map that will be used until 2031.

Despite Madigan being out of office when the 2021 maps were passed, Republicans argue House Democrats continued to follow the former House speaker’s playbook of keeping minority-party lawmakers and the public in the dark.

“Releasing new partisan maps late on a Friday night proves that the Mike Madigan playbook continues in the Illinois House,” state Rep. Ryan Spain said after the current maps were passed. “In a further attempt to skirt any transparency, Democrats dropped partisan maps drawn in a locked room by politicians who hand-selected their voters.”

While the former House speaker endured a few legislative embarrassments over the years, he never lost the votes he desired most from House Democrats. His caucus elected him speaker 18 times in a row before he suspended his bid for reelection in January 2021 as federal investigators closed in on him.

But now, more than 50 years after first taking his seat in the Illinois House of Representatives, Madigan is off to federal prison for “using his official position to corruptly solicit and receive personal financial rewards for himself and his associates,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s office.

Madigan’s trial followed a more than decade-long federal investigation into the former speaker that also led to at least 21 individuals and businesses facing related criminal charges.

While Madigan may be out of the Statehouse, his rules and legacy of gerrymandering that gave him unchallenged power remain. Instead of continuing Madigan’s practice of letting politicians choose their voters, lawmakers should look to other states that have adopted redistricting reforms and seen more competitive elections and greater voter turnout as a result.

Of the six states that have implemented congressional redistricting reform in the past census cycle, five states have seen an increase in the number of competitive congressional districts, as measured by the FiveThirtyEight redistricting tracker. Those states are Colorado, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio and New York.

In contrast to Illinois, Michigan selects a redistricting commission randomly from a pool of Republicans, Democrats and unaffiliated members of the public who cannot be elected officials, candidates for office, lobbyists, employees of the legislature, officers of a political party or closely related to any of those.

The result is for the 2020 cycle Michigan received some of the highest grades for each of its maps from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, particularly in the category of partisan fairness.

Its congressional map has three competitive districts out of 13, which is the highest proportion of competitive districts for a state with five or more congressional districts as determined by FiveThirtyEight.

Overall, the reforms that appear to have had the most initial success in introducing the most competition in state legislative and congressional races are the reforms that distance the legislature, and in fact all politicians, from the redistricting process. Illinois should use these states’ experiences in overhauling its own redistricting process.

The only sure way to implement redistricting reform is for the General Assembly to pass an amendment after the Illinois Supreme Court denied previous attempts to change the process. Until that happens, gerrymandering will continue to be part of Madigan’s long-reaching legacy and a cornerstone of Illinois’ culture of corruption.