SE Illinois News

At a news conference held by Republican lawmakers after Democratic lawmakers released proposed legislative maps, state Rep. Dave Severin (R-Benton) pointed out what he saw as a contradictory behavior by the Democrats.

“The Democrats, they point to the Zoom hearings during the redistricting committees ... as a point of a great act of transparency, but when the cameras were off, the Democrats were doing what? They were behind the scenes working on their partisan maps that we all know about,” he said. 

Reiterating the GOP’s demand to use a redistricting commission that would not involve politicians and Illinoisans’ call for equal representation, Severin said the maps drawn by the majority are flawed. 

“We're missing two key components we need to even begin drawing fair maps,” Severin said. “One of them is politicians need to be taken out of the process. We as politicians have said that all along. The governor previously said earlier that he supported using independent commissions and we don't have one but we need one. Secondly, we don't have the census data that we need to draw accurate maps. What we do need is not to use the ACS material that everybody's been talking about and using as an excuse.”

Severin continued to demand transparency and correctly represented districts. He urged Pritzker to step in to get the redistricting process right.

“We have no answers to these questions and I'm not confident we will get any answers from these sham hearings,” Severin added. “We had over 24 hearings either in person or on Zoom and the same questions were asked by statewide constituents. We’re looking for two things: transparency and fairness. We haven't seen either one of those. We get one chance every 10 years to get this right. The governor will likely only have one map, he can influence how he is going to do this. This is his opportunity.  We will see what happens.”

While running for govenor, Pritzker pledged to refuse any map drawn by politicians and support an independent commission.

However, the governor seems to be signaling to break his promise, stating in April that he would take a look at the maps created by Democrats.