Saying recent election results prove their point, Illinois Republicans have asked the Illinois Supreme Court to throw out a state legislative district map they say are unconstitutionally and undeniably skewed to only ensure Democrats maintain their supermajority in Springfield, regardless of how the state's voters actually vote.
And in their new petition, the Republicans are all but daring the state's Democrat-dominate high court to essentially ignore or overturn a prior state Supreme Court court ruling that they say should render the current map unconstitutional for not only trampling voters' rights, but also violating even the scant rules governing how such maps can be drawn.
On Jan. 29, Republican voters from Cook County, St. Clair County, DeKalb County and elsewhere in the state joined with senior Republican state lawmakers to directly petition the state high court to toss out and replace the state's most recent legislative district map, which was approved by the Democratic legislative supermajority in the General Assembly and Gov. JB Pritzker in 2021.
Illinois Republicans used these House districts as examples of 54 House districts they say are unconstitutionally gerrymandered and violate the rights of Republican voters to representation in Springfield
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"The districts of the Illinois State House of Representatives are the byproduct of extreme partisan gerrymandering," the lawsuit begins. "They are drawn by the political party in control and are intended to entrench the Democratic Party in power. The districts are also meant to prevent voters affiliated with the minority party from electing candidates of their choice. In other words, the general election outcomes are rigged.
"This is not a secret. A federal court acknowledged it. The mapmaker for the Illinois Democratic Party admitted it. One read through the legislative history confirms it. And a glance at the Enacted Plan - with all its contorted, odd-shaped districts - shows it."
In their filing, Republicans assert the 2021 so-called "Enacted Plan" violates several constitutional principles designed to ensure voters' rights are respected and their voices heard in the state capitol.
For decades, Illinois Democrats have controlled the task of redrawing the state's legislative district boundaries following the U.S. Census every 10 years.
With each passing decade, Republicans have asserted Democrats - primarily under the leadership of now-indicted former House Speaker Michael J. Madigan - have grown increasingly brazen at using the process derisively, but commonly known as gerrymandering to carve up the state's population and geography into state House and state Senate districts designed to maximize the ability of Democrats to win seats in the General Assembly and maintaining their dominance of state government.
Republicans, however, have been all but powerless to break that hold, so long as Democrats maintain control of the General Assembly and the governor's office.
Most recently, Madigan and his Democratic allies beat back an attempt by hundreds of thousands of voters from across the state to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot, which would have handed the power to redraw those districts over to an ostensibly independent mapmaking commission, as is done in other U.S. states.
Four years ago, federal judges rejected a legal challenge mounted by Republicans and Hispanic advocacy organizations against the maps approved by Democrats.
However, those lawsuits were rejected by federal judges, who said decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court all but tie the hands of federal courts to review state legislative district lines.
In that ruling, however, a federal appeals panel agreed it was clear Illinois lawmakers were guided almost entirely by the desire to increase Democratic political power in Illinois.
"... The voluminous evidence submitted by the parties overwhelmingly establishes that the Illinois mapmakers were motivated principally by partisan political considerations," the appellate judges wrote.
In the years since that ruling, two elections have been held, and in each, Democrats increased majority in the state House.
And that was the case no matter how many Republicans turned out to vote, the Republicans note in their new lawsuit before the Illinois Supreme Court.
The complaint points out that in 2022, Republican candidates for the state House "won a majority - 50.9% - of the statewide votes. But Republican candidates won only a third of seats" in the House, or 40 of 118.
In 2024, Democrats "won 55% of of the statewide vote," the complaint concedes.
But Democratic state House candidates still "won a super-majority of seats," or 78 of 118.
According to the complaint, Democrats have accomplished the feat of winning a supermajority of Illinois House seats no matter if they win 49% of the vote or 55% of the statewide vote by drawing "contorted" districts that have few relationships to any city, county or other uniting geographical or demographic features, other than ensuring a Democratic majority is present in as many districts as possible.
The complaint points to several prime examples of this severe gerrymandering, including state House districts near Springfield, in the Metro East suburbs of St. Louis, and other districts that carve up Chicago's suburbs and other portions of the state into Tetris-like jigsaw cut shapes.
The complaint notes in the Chicago suburbs, for instance, Republican voters are grouped into districts that "generally emanate from the City (of Chicago) and snake into the suburbs. They are thin and gangly, often no more than a few blocks wide in parts while stretching for miles and across county borders."
The complaint asserts such mapmaking violates the Illinois state constitution's mandates that legislative districts must be both "contiguous" and "compact."
The complaint notes that the Illinois Supreme Court in 1981 in the case known as Schrage v. State Board of Elections, rejected a proposed legislative district map because one of the districts was "insufficiently compact."
The legislative district rejected in Schrage was both wider and more compact than at least 52 House Districts drawn by Democrats in their current legislative map, the complaint said.
The lawsuit notes that computer models conducted by University of Michigan political scientist Jowei Chen revealed that if all Illinois districts were drawn to the standards required in Schrage, Republicans would likely hold 11 more seats than they currently do, depriving Democrats of the supermajority they currently use to routinely ramrod through with only token debate even highly controversial legislation, including gun bans and measures to radically reform the state's criminal justice system
The Republican complaint further notes that it is also possible to redraw every district in the state to satisfy the Schrage compactness criteria while still satisfying demands set by the Voting Rights Act to maximize racial representation for majority black and Hispanic districts.
Beyond the compactness requirements, however, the Republican lawsuit asserts the Democratic legislative district map further violates Illinoisans' rights guaranteed by the state constitution to "free and equal elections."
The complaint argues that Republican voters are denied this right by having their votes "cracked." Under this process, communities which nominally contain Republican majorities cannot elect Republicans to represent them in Springfield, because their communities are divided and their voters absorbed into districts which will always hold a Democratic majority, no matter how many Republicans turn out to vote.
The lawsuit notes that other states' constitutions include similar provisions. And in at least two of those states - Pennsylvania and North Carolina - supreme courts in those states have used that clause to throw out gerrymandered maps drawn by Republicans, claiming they infringed on Democrats' rights to have their vote county equally.
The complaint notes that Pennsylvania's high court "determined that Pennsylvania's Free and Equal Elections Clause requires that all voters 'have an equal opportunity to translate their votes into representation,' and that this requirement is violated where traditional districting criteria such as preserving political subdivisions and compactness are 'subordinated, in whole or in part, to extraneous considerations such as gerrymandering for unfair partisan political advantage.'"
"The Enacted Plan was drawn with the primary motivation to ensure Democratic victories and is anything but 'free and equal,'" the Republicans wrote in their complaint. "The Enacted Plan thus denies voters their equal right to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice, violating Article III, Section 3 of the Illinois Constitution."
The Illinois Supreme Court has not yet taken up the matter.
The lawsuit names as the defendant the Illinois State Board of Elections and the board's members.
The ISBE, which will likely be represented by Democratic Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, also has yet to respond.
Democrats currently hold a 5-2 majority on the Illinois Supreme Court, thanks in no small part to actions by the Democratic supermajority in the General Assembly to also redraw judicial district boundaries for the state high court in 2021, as well.
Under the new map, Democrats succeeded in electing two new justices to the court, Elizabeth Rochford and Mary K. O'Brien. Both Rochford and O'Brien also received massive fundraising support in the 2022 election from Pritzker, current Illinois Speaker of the House Emanuel "Chris" Welch and Democratic political allies, including the state's powerful trial lawyers.