Pull politics out of districts

Commercial-News, Danville, Ill.: Anyone who looks at a map of districts within the Illinois House of Representatives can tell much thought and effort went into configuring the districts — to be sure they favor whichever party happened to be in the majority at the time.

Illinois law requires the General; Assembly to redraw House and Senate districts after every federal census. The practice, in reality, becomes nothing more than a way to lock in incumbents by drawing the districts’ boundaries in their favor.

A group recently organized to change all of that. They want to place the Illinois Independent Redistricting Amendment on the ballot to pull the task of redrawing the legislative districts and hand it to an independent, transparent and non-partisan 11-person commission.

As more of the state’s population concentrates in the area around Chicago, downstate areas will find it more and more difficult to be heard in Springfield. This effort to create fair, non-partisan legislative districts that keep local government units — such as cities — intact as much as possible, would help.