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Illinois General Assembly unrepresentative structurally, says taskforce |
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by rob richie
(No verified email address) |
10 Jul 2001
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Two decades after one of the most monumental reforms in Illinois history, a task force of politicians is calling for a reversal. The law supposedly saved money in government salaries and office expenses by cutting out one-third of the Illinois General Assembly and eliminating MULTIPLE LAWMAKERS were elected from each district instead of only one. But now a 70-member task force led by former Congressman Abner Mikva (Dem.) and former Gov. Jim Edgar (Rep.), says the changes resulted in lower voter turnout, tougher hurdles to victory for women and minority candidates, & the concentration of power. |
Folks,
Two articles follow.
A couple years back, the Institute for Government and
Public Affairs at the University of Illinois received a
major grant to conduct a study of the impact of the
state\'s conversion from cumulative voting to single-
member districts and form a task force that would consider
different electoral systems and make recommendations
for the state. The task force was ultimately co-chaired
by former Republican governor Jim Edgar and former
Democratric Congressman and federal judge Abner Mikva.
The process is completed, with the report to be released
on Monday. CVD has ordered a large number of the
report summaries and will be sending them out to
our leading activists and many others. Below are the
first news articles -- Dan Johnson-Weinberger and his
Midwest Democracy Center crew understandably are
pushing this story hard.
The Illinois story of the impact of very modest proportional
plans in three-seat districts is very helpful to our case for
PR -- and particularly timely to mention as we go through
the current round of redrawing single-member districts.
- Rob
#########
Chicago Tribune
By Christi Parsons
Tribune staff reporter
July 8, 2001
New legislature reform push
http://chicagotribune.com/news/local/article/0,1051,SAV-
0107080314,00.html
Two decades after one of the most monumental reforms in Illinois
political history, a task force of politicians past and present,
including some considered reformers in their own right, is declaring
it a dismal failure and calling for a reversal.
The so-called \"Cutback Amendment\" was supposed to save money in
government salaries and office expenses by cutting out one-third of
the Illinois General Assembly and eliminating a quirky electoral
feature in which multiple lawmakers were elected from each House
district.
But now a 70-member task force of politicians, academics and
government watchdogs, led by former Democratic Congressman Abner
Mikva and former Republican Gov. Jim Edgar, says the changes have
resulted in lower voter turnout, a tougher hurdle to victory for
women and minority candidates, and the concentration of power in the
hands of just a few legislative leaders.
\"It was an attractive idea, because anything that gets rid of
politicians seems good,\" said Mikva, a liberal who has also served as
a federal judge and White House counsel in the Clinton
administration. \"But some negative things resulted. The system is not
working the way it should.\"
The author of the cutback takes issue with the criticism, saying
other factors are to blame for the problems. The task force members
are pining for \"a golden oldie that was rejected by voters,\" said
former State Treasurer Patrick Quinn, who led the cutback crusade in
1980.
Indeed, even task force members acknowledge it would be hard to get
voters to tinker with the system again. People probably would be less
willing to enlarge the legislature than they were to cut it, they
concede. And party leaders who prosper under the current system
aren\'t likely to push for change.
Nevertheless, a majority of the Mikva-Edgar panel recommends the
state go back to the old way of electing lawmakers, a system by which
each legislative district sent three representatives to the Illinois
House. Typically, Republicans and Democrats each put up two
candidates in each district, and voters were given three votes to
divide among them.
When this \"cumulative voting\" system was in place, most legislative
districts elected two representatives of the majority party and a
third representative of the minority party.
Then, in the 1970s, reformers began to float the idea of ending
cumulative voting and cutting the size of the legislature from 177 to
118. The idea picked up steam after lawmakers voted themselves a 40
percent raise in the closing days of the 1978 session.
Quinn and a group called the Coalition for Political Honesty
capitalized on public outrage over the pay raise and managed to get a
proposal for a constitutional amendment to cut back the legislature
on the ballot in 1980. It passed easily with 69 percent of the vote,
recalled Quinn, a Chicago attorney.
\"The old system was a failure,\" said Quinn, a Democrat who parlayed
the publicity he garnered from his referendum efforts into his later
successful run for state treasurer. \"It wasn\'t healthy for people who
have traditionally been excluded.\"
That turns out to be a key point of dispute between Quinn and the
task force. Mikva\'s group said the current system limits the ability
of women and racial and ethnic minorities to win legislative seats.
With three seats per district, a small but active special interest
group could turn out enough voters to win, said Mikva, who once
served in the Illinois House.
\"You could win without a party base,\" Mikva said of his first
legislative race, conducted under the old system. \"My base was the
University of Chicago, and I was able to beat the party candidate.\"
The representation of minority groups has improved in recent decades,
the report concedes, but task force members argue this is a result of
the way district maps have been drawn.
The report also suggests that a decline in voter turnout over the
past two decades is due in part to the lack of competitive
legislative races. Turnout is discernibly lower in districts without
competitive state legislative elections, the task force found.
Because it\'s so much harder and more costly to win, fewer candidates
want to get into a race, said Dan Johnson-Weinberger, a task force
member and executive director of the Midwest Democracy Center, a non-
profit group for electoral reform. Indeed, half of all legislative
races were uncontested in the last general election.
\"What possible incentive is there for people to vote or get involved
if there\'s only one person on the ballot?\" said Johnson-
Weinberger. \"If the minority can\'t elect one of their own and always
loses, voters tend to get the picture and quit participating.\"
Because party support has become so important to candidates,
legislative leaders such as Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan
and Republican Senate President James \"Pate\" Philip control campaign
funds and wield excessive power, the report concludes.
But Quinn disagrees with many of the report\'s conclusions. He
contends the current system isn\'t prohibitive to women and
minorities, or else there wouldn\'t be so many in the legislature now.
He says politicians in power are to blame for low voter turnout and
the lack of competition. They have drawn district maps and made other
decisions that help incumbents and hurt potential challengers, he
charges.
But even task force members acknowledge it will be hard to win
support for their proposed change.
\"It\'s a hard sell,\" acknowledged state Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie (D-
Chicago), majority leader in the House. \"People are not much focused
on the intricacies of how electoral systems operate.\"
Though Currie backs the task force recommendations, she says many of
her colleagues and their political supporters have reason to oppose
them.
\"People who do well under an existing system are likely to be
supportive of it,\" she said. \"I don\'t think advocacy groups, unions
and corporations feel they have lost a voice with the changeover.
Springfield Journal-Register
www.sj-r.com
A vote for cumulative voting
Task force backs system used to elect House members ended by 1980
Cutback Amendment
By BERNARD SCHOENBURG
POLITICAL WRITER
Illinois should return to a system where Illinois House members are
elected three-to-a-district, a new report recommends.
The Illinois Task Force on political Representation and Alternative
Electoral Systems was set up in early 2000 by the Institute of
Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois. The task
force conducted a two-day assembly session in Chicago on Oct. 3-4,
and developed a recommendation to bring a return to multi-member
House districts.
The group\'s formal report is being issued Monday, and it states that
multi-member districts would better represent all voters and reduce
the power of legislative leaders.
A proclamation adopted by that assembly, which is part of the report,
states that instead of single-member, winner-take-all House
districts, cumulative voting tends to provide greater choice for
voters in primary and general elections. It also states cumulative
voting makes it easier for candidates to get in races, gives voters
from the minority party in their areas greater representation and
gives individual legislators more independence from legislative
leaders.
\"A change in electoral systems alone will not resolve the issues
surrounding Illinois\' political system,\" the proclamation
states. \"Campaign finance reform, for example, is a must.
Nonetheless, a change in the current electoral system could be a
significant first step in a process of reform. ...\"
Under Illinois\' 1970 Constitution, there were only 59 legislative
districts in Illinois, and one member of the Senate and three members
of the House were elected from each. Each major party had two
candidates for the House on the general election ballot, so, for
example, at least one Democrat would be elected in a Republican area.
Voters could cast three votes for one House candidate, 11/2 votes for
each of two candidates, or one vote for each of three candidates.
Some form of cumulative voting for the House had been used in
Illinois since the late 1800s.
But after a 40 percent pay raise lawmakers voted themselves in the
fall of 1978, a petition drive led by Patrick Quinn, who would later
become state treasurer, led to a referendum in which voters chose to
reduce membership in the Illinois House. With nearly 69 percent
support in 1980, the new system took effect in 1982. Under that
system, House members have been elected one-per-district from 118
districts.
Since that time, the report states, there is less competition, with
half of all House races uncontested in 2000. Voter turnout
is \"abysmally low,\" with just 44 percent of eligible voters casting
votes in House elections in 2000. Campaign costs have soared in
competitive districts, with some races costing more than $1 million.
In areas where one party dominates, voters from the other party don\'t
feel represented, the report states.
\"Although there are some notable exceptions to this generalization,
many Chicago Republicans and collar-county Democrats find themselves
without partisan representation,\" the report states. \"To put it
another way, Republican votes in Chicago and Democratic votes in the
collar counties (surrounding Cook County) are wasted.\"
The report also states that now, \"legislative leaders wield excessive
power, including the power to allocate campaign funds. As a result,
many, if not most, legislators feel that their participation in the
legislative process and their capacities to be responsive to their
constituencies have been dangerously diminished.\"
The report also states that with single-member districts, \"The
representation of racial, ethnic and gender groups has marginally
improved in recent decades, yet their ability to win legislative
seats under the existing electoral system remains limited.\" It also
states that \"group identity and consciousness have grown during the
last two decades,\" so \"bloc voting might be more prevalent than it
was in earlier years if members of the various groups felt they could
rally successfully around a candidate. Such a feeling of efficacy is
far more likely under cumulative than plurality voting.\"
The task force was chaired by former Gov. Jim Edgar, a Republican,
and former federal appellate judge and White House counsel Abner
Mikva, a Democrat.
A key backer and participant is Dan Johnson-Weinberger of Chicago,
director of the Midwest Democracy Center, a group that has been
working to bring back cumulative voting. He favors having 39 House
districts with three members each, for 117 House members.
\"We can call it the cutback amendment,\" he joked, because House
membership would drop by one.
There would still be 59 single-member Senate districts, not drawn to
coincide with the House districts, he said.
\"The whole point of representative democracy is that everyone has a
voice in the legislature,\" he said. \"Electing only one person
guarantees that millions of people in Illinois don\'t have that voice.\"
Johnson-Weinberger debated Quinn about the issue at the October
meeting, and Quinn also is a participant in the process.
Quinn said he thinks the task force was assembled with the idea of
calling for a return to cumulative voting.
\"You have a lot of alumni of that system,\" he said. \"It was like a
trip down memory lane for those folks.\"
But Quinn also said districts would be larger in a cumulative voting
system, creating less chance for strong dominance of an ethnic
minority in any district. Larger districts have been found
problematic in federal courts because of the dilution of minority
votes, he said. With cumulative voting returning, he added, there
would be more confusion and probably more spoiled ballots because,
for example, of a person\'s ability to cast three votes for House
members.
And as for powerful leaders, Quinn said, \"Apparently these guys
didn\'t know (former House Speakers) Paul Powell and W. Robert Blair
and some of the barons under the old system\" when there was still
cumulative voting.
Quinn said he presented alternative ideas, including having a
statewide referendum annually that would be a retention vote for the
House speaker and Senate president. A losing vote would mean a new
leader would have to be chosen, and the accountability, Quinn said,
could curtail some of the secretive deals now undertaken by
leadership.
He also said House members could be elected on a nonpartisan basis,
so primary voters would not have to declare their party -- thus
boosting voter turnout. In such races, similar to most Illinois
municipal elections, the top two finishers in a primary would square
off in the general election.
Johnson-Weinberger questioned Quinn\'s assertion that cumulative
voting wouldn\'t be good for racial minority representation. He said
Lani Guinier, who was at one time former President Bill Clinton\'s
nominee for assistant attorney general for civil rights, is among top
proponents of cumulative voting.
Scott Koeneman, communications manager for U of I\'s Institute for
Government and Public Affairs, said that while the report calls for
three-member House districts, it doesn\'t specify how many districts
there should be. He noted, as does the report, that many people may
have favored the 1980 Cutback Amendment just to reduce the number of
House members.
The report also notes a U of I survey that indicates 70 percent of
respondents in April 2000 preferred a system in which both a Democrat
and Republican could represent a district where one party has 70
percent of local support.
Johnson-Weinberger, whose group works closely with The Center for
Voting and Democracy in Washington, D.C., said his group\'s immediate
goal is to try to get House Executive Committee approval this fall,
during the veto session, for House Joint Resolution-Constitutional
Amendment 4. HJRCA4, if passed by the full legislature, would ask
voters in a statewide referendum if 39 three-member districts should
be in place by the 2004 election.
Johnson-Weinberger, a lawyer who was active in Ralph Nader\'s 2000
presidential campaign, thinks that among close watchers of Illinois
politics, \"the consensus has shifted\" in recent years back toward
favoring cumulative voting.
\"This is the next great expansion of democracy,\" he said.
Quinn, a Democrat who says he is \"definitely interested\" in running
for governor in 2002, also says he is not opposed to reform, but
doesn\'t think the right reform is to say, \"Let\'s go back to the past.\"
Bernard Schoenburg can be reached at 788-1540
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See also:
www.fairvote.org
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