By Peter Hancock
Capitol News Illinois
SPRINGFIELD Illinois lawmakers passed measures Friday to redraw state legislative and judicial district lines, less than 24 hours after the bills implementing the maps were introduced.
The latest versions of the legislative maps were released about 6:30 p.m. Thursday. The actual legislation to implement them was released in the early hours of Friday morning, according to lawmakers. Those bills were then heard in the House and Senate Redistricting committees during 9:30 a.m. hearings that were announced with about one hour’s notice.
Those revised House and Senate maps are similar to a draft set of maps that were released late last week and were the subject of joint committee hearings Tuesday and Wednesday. During the Tuesday hearing, the maps drew wide criticism from racial, ethnic and religious communities, particularly in the Chicago area, who complained that they broke up communities of interest and diluted minority voting power.
By Peter Hancock
Capitol News Illinois
SPRINGFIELD Illinois lawmakers opened their first public hearing Tuesday on a proposed set of new House and Senate district maps with Democrats and Republicans still at sharp odds over how the maps were drawn and whether or not they are fair.
House and Senate Democrats unveiled the proposed maps last week. They were reportedly drawn using population estimates from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey because official numbers from the 2020 census will not be available until August or September.
Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, D.C., who was hired as a consultant by the House and Senate Democratic caucuses, testified that in his opinion, ACS data is acceptable to use for redistricting because in the five years leading up to the 2010 census, those estimates for Illinois were off by only about 0.3 percent.
SPRINGFIELD — Senate Democrats on Friday approved legislative district maps to govern elections in the Illinois General Assembly for the next decade despite an outcry from Republicans and Democratic-leaning community