Under the Illinois Constitution, legislative districts must be “compact, contiguous, and substantially equal in population.” (IL Constitution Article 4.3a). The first of these requirements — compactness— is “almost universally recognized” as an appropriate anti-gerrymandering standard.” (Schrage v. State Board of Elections, 88 Ill 2d 87, 96 [1981]). 

The framers of the Illinois Constitution agreed. They noted that the compactness standard “reflect[s] the objective of improving legislative representation through seeking to insure that districts are not gerrymandered.” 6 RECORD OF PROCEEDINGS, SIXTH ILLINOIS CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION 1352-53. They highlighted that, “[w]here no standards of this nature exist, there exists an open invitation to gerrymander.” Id. at 1353. 

The Illinois Supreme Court recognized these important principles in Shrage v. State Board of Elections in a compactness challenge to Representative District 89. 

The court found that visual examination of RD 89 was sufficient to show it was not “compact”. This examination “reveal[ed] a tortured, extremely long elongated form which is not compact in any sense.” Id. So, RD 89 “fai[ed] to meet the compactness standard as required by Article 4, Section 3a of the Illinois Constitution.” 

Applying compactness scores to the Schrage District, utilizing proven analytic scores of compactness called the Reock and Polsby-Popper scores, Dr. Jowei Chen found, in his expert analysis, that 52 of the 118 House Districts in the Enacted Plan exhibit worse compactness scores than the Schrage district found previously uncompact under Illinois case law. 

Dr. Chen further determined it is not necessary to draw districts that are less compact than the Schrage District. In all 10,000 of the computer-simulated plans that the algorithm produced either match or exceed the Enacted Plan’s number of majority-black and majority-Latino districts, and none of the simulated plans contain a single district with compactness scores worse than the Schrage District’s Reock or Polsby-Popper scores. 

Not one district fell below minimum scores of compactness. In other words, it is possible to draw every district to be at least as compact as the Schrage district, even while equalizing population and creating districts that comply with Voting Rights Act standards for minority representation districts. 

Dr. Chen, using the results of recent competitive statewide elections during 2014-2022, found that the Enacted Plan creates a significant pro-Democratic electoral bias, resulting in 4 to 11 fewer Republican-favoring districts when compared to the median outcomes among the non-partisan computer-simulated plans. In other words, the Enacted Plan creates fewer Republican-favoring districts than nearly all of the computer-simulated plans. 

Importantly, according to Dr. Chen, the pro-Democratic electoral bias caused by the Enacted Plan is largest in elections in which Republican candidates have their strongest performances. When Republicans win 47-52% of the statewide vote, the Enacted Plan delivers the greatest reduction in the number of Republican-favoring districts, compared to the computer- simulated plan. This effectively serves as an “insurance policy” for the House Democrats. The better Republican candidates do, the more effective the Democratic gerrymander is. 

This is what we mean when we say the map is “rigged”. 

How mapmakers accomplished this was to create long, thin, non-compact districts in order to connect majority-Black districts in Cook County to Republican precincts in the suburbs of the Chicago metro area. This effectively removed the Republicans from suburban districts that would have been more electorally competitive or Republican-leaning. 

The recently completed election cycle made clear how successful the partisan gerrymandering really was. Of the 2024 Illinois House elections, Democratic candidates won 55% of the statewide vote. But Democratic candidates won a super-majority of seats (78 of 118, or 66.1%). 

The 2022 election cycle was worse. There, Republican candidates for the Illinois House won a majority— 50.9% — of the statewide vote. But Republican candidates won only a third of seats (40 of 118). 

With this level of entrenched dominance, it is unsurprising that almost half (54 of 118) of the State House elections in 2024 were uncontested. For would-be Republican candidates in artificially “safe” Democratic districts, there is no point in running. The same goes for would-be Democratic candidates, in districts that have been artificially “packed” with Republicans. 

The volume of uncontested races means that almost half of the state’s Representatives will represent Illinoisans, not because they were elected and had to present  their policy ideas to voters through debate and outreach, but only because they submitted the proper forms to the Illinois State Board of Elections. This is not how this is supposed to work. Extreme partisan gerrymandering like this is poisonous to the functioning of democracy.