Illinois has just enacted maps for legislative and state supreme court (!) elections for the 2020s — but NOT congressional districts. Iowa and other states have been told that it is absolutely impossible to get anything close to the real numbers from the 2020 census until mid-August at the earliest. So how did it happen?
Illinois didn’t use the 2020 census numbers. According to St. Louis Public Radio, “Democratic leaders in the General Assembly moved forward using population estimates from the previous five years of data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.” The first versions of the maps came out late on Friday, May 21, reports WBEZ. That appears to be what’s on the Illinois General Assembly website here, but it does not match detailed Google Maps interactive versions (House, Senate). You can tell right away because the Google versions show a district that runs from the Quad Cities through Galesburg to Macomb. The bill number in the headline also does not match news coverage.
On May 28, according to the Springfield State Journal-Register, the Illinois Legislature passed House Bill 2777. More accurately, they passed Senate Amendment 1 to House Bill 2777. That is one day after the filename of the Google maps linked above. What was originally in House Bill 2777? It began as a tiny bill with one purpose: “Extends the repeal date of the Cemetery Oversight Act from January 1, 2022 to January 1, 2030.” By the time it got out of the Illinois House, that was still in there, but there was a ton of other stuff thrown in.
Then the Senate got hold of it. “Replaces everything after the enacting clause. Creates the General Assembly Redistricting Act of 2021. Redistricts the Legislative Districts (for election of Senators) and the Representative Districts (for election of Representatives). Effective immediately.”
Iowa’s redistricting legislation specifies districts in plain text, specifying what streets or geographic features the districts follow or include. Illinois’ legislation uses 15-digit-long census tract numbers.
To summarize, in 14 days, Illinois Democrats introduced, revised, passed, and got signed a redistricting bill that does not use actual census data and started life as legislation related to the Cemetery Oversight Act.
To quote Dave Barry, I am not making this up.