Reform commission says computers, not hacks, should draw districts

EAST ST. LOUIS -- If Illinoisans are going to say farewell to corruption, they’ll have to kiss some other things goodbye: closed primaries, partisan maps, politicians for life and the “messed up” budget process in Springfield.

That was the latest sneak preview, provided in East St. Louis last Thursday evening, at a sparsely attended session of the group charged with coming up with ways to halt corruption in state government.

The group, a volunteer assemblage headed by the man who put George Ryan in jail, has had 100 days to come up with recommendations for reform.

Those 100 days are up this week, when the group is scheduled to issue its report to Gov. Pat Quinn, who created the Illinois Reform Commission with his first executive order after replacing the impeached Rod Blagojevich.

“I’m kind of letting the cat out of the bag a little bit,” commission member Brad McMillan said on Thursday, but he wanted to let people know that help was on the way.

McMillan spoke after Regina Dunbar Hendrickson, an alderman in nearby Troy, told commission members, “We’ve definitely got to do something about redistricting. We need to take the politics out of it.”

McMillan held up what he said was a draft of the commission’s report and said one of the recommendations Quinn will get Tuesday will be to have legislative and congressional districts drawn by a non-partisan, independent body using computer software programs.

As it stands now, he said, it’s a process that occurs “in total secrecy behind closed doors conducted by political operatives.” How it should be done, he said, is through a series of public hearings.

“It’s critically important how our districts are drawn,” he said, adding that the goal is that they be drawn “in what is in the best interest of the people of the state of Illinois rather than the political interest.”

Under the proposals the commission plans to make, he said, some current practices would be barred.

“They cannot know the voting history of voters or the residential addresses of incumbents,” McMillan said.

He pointed to the 17th Congressional District drawn after the 2000 census as the poster child for cartographic contortions.

The district’s chief population is in the Quad Cities along the Mississippi River in northwestern Illinois. It meanders down and then over to Springfield, where it snakes along a literal single alley before bursting east to Decatur, all in the name of collecting enough Democrats to keep sending Lane Evans to Washington.

Evans, who was having a tougher time getting re-elected by his original Quad Cities constituency, is gone, but the seat remains in Democratic hands, occupied by Evans’ former chief of staff Phil Hare, who initially was appointed to the seat after Evans quit a week after winning the 2006 primary.

Several said Thursday that those sorts of legacies – pol to aide, parent to child, departing official to beholden appointee – are among the things that have to stop if Illinois is truly going to change course. For one reason, they alienate the public, making them feel they have no real role in who represents them.

Last month, Patrick Collins, the former assistant U.S. attorney who was lead prosecutor on the Ryan case, said the tradition of pulling a slip of paper from Abraham Lincoln’s hat every 10 years to decide who gets to draw the state’s political district boundaries was a travesty.

At Thursday’s session, the new director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute echoed that, saying, “Non-partisan redistricting is as close to a silver bullet as you’re going to find.”

The director, David Yepsen, a longtime political reporter for the Des Moines Register, said experience in Iowa showed that changing the redistricting process helps problems associated with corruption and partisan posturing – such as the quest for campaign contributions during an endless election cycle – evaporate.

A spokesman for Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan told reporters last month that adopting a remap process such as the one in Iowa wouldn’t work in Illinois, a more populous and racially and ethnically diverse state.

However, Yepsen said Thursday that there were ways to ensure minority groups don’t lose representation yet still remove partisanship from the process.

A related concern of the dozen or so who attended Thursday’s session, in the words of one, was the divide between “Chicago and everything else” – how the issues that affect downstate residents keep from being trammeled by the big-city pols.

The commission’s answer appears likely to be some form of term limits, at least on legislative leaders in Springfield. Madigan, for example, has been speaker for all but two years of the past quarter century.

Commission members said they also plan to recommend an open primary as a way to improve public participation in the political process.

Now, voters have to declare which party ballot they want and that choice is a matter of public record. Voting history has long been a prerequisite for receiving jobs on the public payroll: If you haven’t voted the right party, you don’t get hired.

In an open primary system, all offices are contained on a single ballot and voters, allowed to move among parties from race to race, make private partisan decisions.

Another item being considered, McMillan said, is how to open up the state budget process.

“The budget process in Illinois is seriously flawed,” he said. “Leaders meet behind closed doors and put everything into an omnibus bill. The representatives have no real opportunity for input or review” before being called to vote up or down on it.

He said the commission would recommend that lawmakers first set the total budget amount and, after that binding decision is made, come up with specific amounts to pay for individual programs and operations.

In addition, McMillan said, instead of a single bill containing the entire state budget, the commission is poised to recommend that lawmakers split the budget into five separate bills, each focused on a specific sphere, such as education, and that public hearings be required on each of those spheres.

Only then, McMillan said, would meaningful checks and balances be brought about on a process run amok.

“The budget process,” he said, “is really, really messed up right now.”