Editorial Roundup: Illinois
Chicago Sun-Times. February 8, 2024.
Editorial: For voters’ sake, draw the line and end gerrymandering
Lawmakers across the country are finagling ways to give themselves an edge in elections, which erodes the rights of voters to representatives of their choice. Solutions: The U.S. Supreme Court could step in, or states could agree to have congressional maps drawn by an independent commission.
Time was, voting rights activists worried about old-fashioned gerrymandering, the practice of a political party that’s in power drawing up election districts to gain an edge in upcoming elections.
Now, though, activists are starting to worry about “entrenchment gerrymandering.” That’s when a political party manages to draw up voting districts so lopsidedly favorable to itself that even if the opposition scores a landslide victory in the popular vote on Election Day, the opposition still can’t win a majority of seats in a legislative body. Nor can the opposition get a chance to draw its own maps after the next Census.
That’s a serious problem for our democracy, which is supposed to respond to the concerns of the majority of voters, not the self-interest of politicians. But no one is stepping in as lawmakers across the country finagle ways to give themselves an edge, not even the U.S. Supreme Court. That has to change.
Gerrymandering has beset the voting process since then-Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry in 1812 allowed redistricting to favor his party. But the increasingly scientific use of computers has made it much easier to draw a map that favors a particular party and undermines a representative vote.
Maps can make a big difference in how elections turn out. In 2022, for example, North Carolina Democrats and Republicans each won seven congressional seats in the 2022 midterms in a state that is roughly split between the parties. But after Republicans gained control of the state’s Supreme Court, they drew a new map that in 2024 could elect as many as 11 Republicans — and just three Democrats. In the future, even if Democrats win the most votes statewide in races for Congress, they are unlikely to win more than four of the 14 seats.
In Wisconsin, where the number of Democrat and Republican voters is roughly even, Republicans hold a 64-35 majority in the state’s Assembly and a 22-11 supermajority in the Senate. That is expected to change after Democrats won a majority of seats on the state’s Supreme Court, which in December ordered new maps.
On a national level, gerrymandering by one party for congressional seats can offset gerrymandering by the other, as a 2023 Associated Press analysis found regarding the 2022 elections.
Even so, the damage done by gerrymandering is vast.
1. As the Sun-Times’ Tina Sfondeles reported recently, remaps in Illinois keep the powerful in power; in this case, the Democrats, rather than Republicans, who have most often used gerrymandering to their advantage in other states.
2. If voters belong to one party, they have little say in who represents them when the districts in which they live are dominated by the other party.
3. Sometimes, districts are drawn up to be so one-sided that the party that didn’t draw the map doesn’t even field a candidate. Politicians, in effect, pick their voters, instead of voters picking their representatives.
4. Gerrymandering favors politicians on the extreme left or right because they need only worry about the primary election, not the general election, where they will face only token opposition at most. That may contribute to the electorate becoming more polarized, said Shawn J. Donahue, an assistant professor of political science at the University at Buffalo and an expert on gerrymandering.
5. Voters in oddly shaped, elongated districts might find their priorities are not shared by other voters who live far from them.
If entrenchment gerrymandering takes over a state, “You are just locked potentially in a permanent or a long-term cycle until someone who is going to be kind of a referee says we are not going to allow this,” Donahue said.
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Decatur Herald-Review. February 8, 2024.
Editorial: Remember, honor Abraham Lincoln
Coming days will be packed with action, gatherings, and with a little luck, love.
Valentine’s Day is Wednesday, Feb. 14. You’re short on time to prepare some kind of surprise for your sweetheart.
Because you won’t want to be trying to take care of those things on Sunday, Feb. 11. You’ll probably be preparing to attend or host a Super Bowl-watching party.
We hope you’ve already taken care of your wings request.
So it is easy to let Abraham Lincoln’s birthday slip away without notice. We don’t even mark his birthday this year until Feb. 19. That federal holiday is the third Monday in February.
Central Illinois’ relationship with Abraham Lincoln is long and complex.
We have a tendency to take our 16th president for granted. You’re never more than a brief drive from something Lincoln-related, and his specter hangs over the area. The presence of the icon overwhelms the man and his actions.
We’ve been drilled with the basics for a lifetime. Born in 1809, he made every effort to better himself and his education. Compassion and fairness were sacrosanct. He rose to prominence nationally. His election came in an America even more divided than today. In a four-way race in 1860, Lincoln was elected president with just shy of 40% of the vote. He won 18 of 33 states. Lincoln’s name was not on the ballot in 10 Southern states.
The election set the stage for the Civil War, and his managing of same was critical in both keeping the states united and cementing his reputation as one of the finest presidents in the country’s history.
As much as the Civil War invariably held his attention throughout his presidency, Lincoln oversaw additional changes and innovations. The Land-Grant College Act of 1862 (the Morrill Act) provided grants of land to states to finance the establishment of colleges specializing in “agriculture and the mechanic arts.” The University of Illinois was one of 69 land-grant schools founded as a result of the act.
Lincoln also established the United States Department of Agriculture, which still remains responsible for developing and executing federal government policy on farming, forestry and food.
Lincoln’s second inaugural address, more than a century and a half later, still frames the idea of an ideal America: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and of his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Striving toward that goal continues to be an important tribute to the man as well as the icon.
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