UPDATED: Fair Maps Effort Returns
Former Commerce Secretary and Obama Chief of Staff Bill Daley is one of the co-chairs of the Fair Maps Illinois coalition.
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Ten years after the Illinois Supreme Court stopped a ballot measure to change the way the state draws its legislative maps, a bipartisan group is trying the effort again in 2026.
A coalition led by former Commerce Secretary and former White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley and former Transportation Secretary and former Congressman Ray LaHood
will formally announce the effort this morning in Chicago.
The campaign appears to mirror a high profile effort to amend the state’s constitution in 2016 by removing the job of drawing legislative maps from the General Assembly. The Supreme Court removed it from the ballot at the request of Democratic leaders jus three months before the 2016 general election, ruling the question was unconstitutional.
We’re told the new effort, drafted by Democratic attorney Michael Dorf and Republican attorney Bill Cadigan, has corrected the issues the Supreme Court found in the issue a decade ago.
The new remapping process would take the vote out of the hands of the legislative majorities, creating a 12-person commission made up of General Assembly and non-legislative members each appointed by the four legislative leaders.
If the commission were deadlocked, the traditional “name in a hat” would be drawn to create the legislative maps.
“They’ve got this figured out,” one source said. “If this doesn’t hold up, it’ll be the most corrupt thing you’ve ever seen by the court.”
We’re told campaign staff and funding have yet to be secured and the group has yet to open a state campaign account.
To qualify for the ballot, the effort will require more than 325,000 valid signatures.
The plaintiff for the 2016 lawsuit striking down the maps was lobbyist John Hooker, who was recently convicted and sentenced to 18 months in prison for his role in the Commonwealth Edison scheme to bribe former House Speaker Michael Madigan.
UPDATE: From the coalition’s announcement Tuesday:
Former senior Obama officials Bill Daley and Ray LaHood are heading Fair Maps Illinois, a drive to amend the Illinois Constitution in 2026 to eliminate gerrymandering for state legislative districts in Illinois.
“It’s simply the right thing to do,” declared Daley, who was chief of staff for President Obama and Commerce Secretary for President Clinton. “Gerrymandering protects those in power and shuts voters out of elections. This is not a partisan issue—it’s a democratic crisis. Both parties have used gerrymandering to lock in power, silence dissent, and erode trust in government. As other states play partisan games that compromise our democracy, Illinois can be a model for reform.”
Fair Maps Illinois is a new, nonpartisan 501(c)(4) citizen organization that plans to educate voters about the evils of gerrymandering, recruit volunteers, and garner more than 450,000 petition signatures to put a proposed amendment to amend the Illinois Constitution on the November 2026 ballot. The proposed amendment would only reform the state legislative redistricting process (and not modify the Congressional redistricting process), as confined by constitutional limitations on citizen-initiated amendments to the Illinois Constitution.
“Gerrymandering shifts decision-making to the primary election of the majority party in a district,” said LaHood, a former Republican member of the U.S House and US Secretary of Transportation under President Obama. “Gerrymandering denies the opposing party’s voters and independents any say in the election, and sharply reduces competition. Nearly half of state legislative races in Illinois are uncontested, and less than 5% are competitive. That’s not democracy.”
LaHood pointed out that in 2024, 54 of the 118 Illinois House districts were uncontested, and only 4% were contested (decided by less than 5%). In one-party districts, winners are decided long before the general election, leaving independents and voters from the other party without a voice. Fewer than one in four Illinoisans vote in primaries, so most voters never have a real choice.
The Fair Maps Illinois co-chairs project their group will have to raise several million dollars to conduct a statewide petition drive as well as combat a legal challenge that is sure to come from political insiders who benefit from gerrymandering.
In 2016, in a 4 Democrat to 3 Republican decision, the Illinois Supreme Court knocked off the ballot a proposal backed by more than 600,000 voters that would have created an independent redistricting commission for Illinois. The court found the proposed language too complicated.
