News Clips

“If anything, the climate is more tense now than it was 10 years ago,” said Khalif Ali, executive director of the good-government group Common Cause Pennsylvania. “Once again, I anticipate districts that don’t really reflect registered voters and the people of Pennsylvania, and I also expect a veto from Gov. Wolf and then onto the Supreme Court.” For those reasons, and more, Ali said it’s important for Pennsylvania to adopt an independent commission to helm the state’s redistricting process — a long-sought change by advocates that has failed to gain necessary traction in Harrisburg. “I think we have to take the politics out of it,” Ali said. “I think a lot of what we do is eating away at the integrity of democracy, and if we continue doing it, I don’t think we can expect people to participate.”

“Those are the people I feel have been dishonored by the path that the Illinois General Assembly has now chosen,” said Jay Young, executive director of Common Cause Illinois. “It should be the job of our elected officials to sort of recognize that this challenge exists, to recognize that they’re not going to be able to draw the district lines with any degree of specificity, they’re not going to be able to draw equal districts.”

The state could become “the canary in the coal mine” when it comes to using nondecennial census data that way, said Jay Young, the executive director of Common Cause Illinois. Young and others say that route is rife with potential legal challenges. It also undercuts the investment the state made financially and in outreach to underserved communities to get a good census count. Change Illinois, Common Cause and other groups nationwide have pushed legislatures to engage the public in the redistricting process.

“The concern in some of those states is that the legislators will simply use a special session to secretly pass maps with zero public scrutiny, and then count on a tight timetable to eke out at least one election cycle” before a court could require new maps to be drawn, said Kathay Feng, the redistricting and representation director at Common Cause.

Amanda Gonzalez, executive director of Common Cause Colorado, said that doesn't leave much time for the mechanics of the redistricting process, even if there is technically enough time to draw maps. The commission, created by a 2018 ballot measure, mandates 21 public meetings as part of the mapmaking process along with an extensive public comment period. "What we're looking at right now is how do we maintain that process," she said. "We want to give the commission time to review the information that comes to them, give community members time to look at the census data that comes in, and everybody's gonna want time to, to look at the data."

Our democracy has endured wars, pandemics, natural disasters and now a lawless president. And despite that, next year will likely bring more unexpected challenges that we’ll confront as a nation. We nonetheless must be thankful for what we have, as imperfect as our system is. Change has often been cyclical, and following the scandals of the Trump administration, we may soon have a once-in-a-generation opportunity. If one thing is clear, it’s that we’re on the doorstep of passing a comprehensive reform package to put “we the people” back in charge of our democracy.