Just hours after redrawn state legislative maps were passed by lawmakers, attorneys for a group challenging the new boundaries told a federal judge Wednesday that the plan shortchanges Latinos.
Ernest Herrera, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said the federal census showed the Latino population in Illinois grew by 15% over the last decade.
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“Latinos were not rewarded or given their fair share of districts after that population growth,” Herrera told U.S. District Judge Robert Dow. “Latinos were, in fact, penalized.”
Herrera said the number of state Senate districts with a majority Latino voting age population would drop from three to two under the Democratic-drawn maps, and from five to four in the House.
“We believe there are serious constitutional but likely Section 2 claims here,” Herrera said, citing the section of the federal Voting Rights Act which prohibits practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity.
Illinois Republicans indicated they also would proceed with their challenge to the maps based on federal voting rights violation, though they said they needed time to conduct a thorough analysis.
The parties challenging the maps asked Dow for at least a month to assemble their arguments contesting the constitutionality of the redrawn districts in providing sufficient ethnic and racial representation.
The maps pushed through by Democrats during a special session Tuesday are not yet law, though Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker is expected to sign off on them. The maps reflect pandemic-delayed census figures released Aug. 12, and are a redo after Democrats in May used estimated data from the census bureau’s American Community Survey to fashion maps aimed at extending their control of the legislature through the next decade.
Democrats chose to use the estimated data after it became evident that federal census data would not arrive in time to meet a June 30 state constitutional deadline that would trigger a process that could have led to Republicans gaining control of the mapmaking effort.
Republicans and MALDEF each filed federal lawsuits contesting the use of population estimates in early June, shortly after the original map was signed into law by Pritzker.
On Wednesday, they told Dow that the case should be resolved by January to meet the state’s 2022 election calendar, under which candidates can begin circulating petitions late in that month for primary elections that have been moved back to June 28.
After the actual census data was released in August, Republicans said their analysis showed the map passed in May had a population deviance of 30% between its most populated and least populated House districts — at odds with a 10% variance allowed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
During Wednesday’s court hearing, Sean Berkowitz, an attorney for the Democratic leaders of the General Assembly, acknowledged that the districts in the May map “were malapportioned and presumptively unconstitutional.”
The newest version of the map has a population variance of 0.48%, Democrats said, and attorneys for the Republicans and MALDEF said the variance issue was no longer part of their argument.
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Michael Kasper, longtime attorney for the state Democratic Party, also representing the General Assembly’s Democratic leaders, said his clients were prepared to defend any claims of unconstitutionality involving the newly passed maps.
Republicans, who restated arguments about a lack of transparency by Democrats in the mapmaking process, had also asked the federal court to rule that Democrats could not have a do-over of the map. They said the state constitution requires a map to be effective by June 30, otherwise a bipartisan commission is required to draw a map. After the commission invariably deadlocks, a ninth member is picked by chance as a tiebreaker to decide partisan control of the map.
Democrats have argued nothing in the constitution prevents voting on new revised maps. But Republicans have wanted the federal courts to order the state to start the process over under a bipartisan commission.
Dow, however, indicated that argument alone was not likely to succeed for Republicans in federal court.
“That’s an argument that ought to be deferred to the Illinois Supreme Court as opposed to a federal three judge panel because it arises under the Illinois Constitution,” the federal judge said. “The Illinois Constitution provides for a direct action under the Illinois Supreme Court.”