Democracy upended by gerrymandering

My son and his family live in central Illinois. Politically, the residents there are apparently unlike many living in northeast Illinois. It seems to be a more mixed picture of conservatives. Moderates and progressives who make up central Illinois communities.

I have been told that roughly two-thirds of Illinois voters live in northeast Illinois. The remaining third live outside metro Chicago. For “big” Illinois elections (i.e., the Illinois governor, the Senate races and some U.S. congressional district races), the outcome appears to be mostly one party. My question: Why should people living outside metro Chicago vote in these races? Some think that democracy in Illinois has been compromised for a long time, and not just recently.

The embarrassing reality of gerrymandering continues to plague the U.S. in both red and blue states. Gerrymandering was first named after a U.S. Vice President named Elbridge Gerry. Earlier, Gerry was also a governor of Massachusetts. In 1812, Gerry signed a bill “that created a partisan district in the Boston area that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander. The term has negative connotations, and gerrymandering is almost always considered a corruption of the democratic process,” according to a Wikipedia entry.

Creating partisan voting districts is “hardly what the Founding Fathers envisioned and it’s the opposite of what democracy demands,” to quote the Daily Herald Opinion page from Oct. 24.

About three weeks earlier, columnist Keith Raffel wrote: “Most votes for members of Congress just don’t matter nowadays. In 2019, the Supreme Court acknowledged that partisan gerrymandering may be ‘incompatible with democratic principles’ but went on to hold that the federal court ought not to intervene anyway.”

Are not the races for Illinois governor, and U.S. Senate seats and most U.S. House of Representative Illinois offices already decided?

William A. Decker

Des Plaines