Another group has stepped forward to sue Illinois Democrats over the remap process.
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund sued top Democrats and state election officials late yesterday on behalf of 5 Latino registered voters in Illinois, saying that the new maps are malapportioned and used bad data to not ensure equal representation of all of the state’s population.
Thomas Saenez, MALDEF president and general counsel, says his group doesn’t know if Illinois Democrats are protecting people’s representation or not because the data they used to draw the maps are unavailable or they used the wrong data.
The group is suing Pritzker, House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, Senate President Don Harmon and members of the Illinois State Board of Elections. The lawsuit asks the court to order lawmakers to throw out the maps and to draw new maps using 2020 census data. Democrats allegedly used American Community Survey data, which doesn’t seek to count each person but takes an annual sample of a fraction of households to estimate household characteristics, such as education level and household income.
MALDEF and more than 50 other human and civil rights organizations have opposed the data for months, saying it doesn’t properly capture minority groups in the state. Most other states in the country are awaiting delayed census data to draw their new maps.