City Council members met Monday night to discuss legislative redistricting, a measure to ensure that each Evanston ward has an equal number of voters.
Evanston wards will end up being redrawn through subsequent meetings, although the changes won’t be major, said city manager Roger Crum. The council decided to reconvene at a special meeting on July 12 in hopes of having more complete information on how to handle redistricting.
Every district in the nation must comply with legal guidelines to ensure fairness in voting. One of those guidelines stipulates that the voting eligible population must be divided as equally as possible into separated districts.
“A majority of our wards are not in compliance,” said Crum, whom aldermen charged with the task of gathering and analyzing Census 2000 numbers. After each census, the city analyzes the data to make sure that it’s still in compliance, he said.
In order to stay compliant, the city must abide by the “one person, one vote” principle, which requires that the smallest and largest ward of a city not differ in population of people over 18 years of age by more than 10 percent.
But Evanston’s First Ward, with the largest voting population at 8,338, is more than 35 percent larger than the Second Ward, which contains 5,381 people. The Seventh Ward, with 7,175 eligible voters, exceeds the Second Ward’s population by 25 percent, according to census information.
City attorney Herbert Hill said the information analysis may not be complete by the July 12 meeting “because of the narrow time frame” the committee members gave him and Crum to gather the information.
In addition, Ald. Arthur Newman (1st) wanted accurate numbers on districts where non-whites are in the majority to be available by July 12.
According to another principle, which is in compliance with the Voting Rights Act, a minority group should be the majority in a percentage of districts that is directly proportional to the percentage of the electorate they hold. The act protects the voting strength of minority classes.
However, this principle is not to be favored over other factors the committee will consider, such as equal distribution of the voting eligible population and equal representation of political parties.
“We will not have the actual numbers of minority populations extracted (by the next meeting),” Crum said. He said it should take a month to extract those numbers from all of the census files his office has received.
Newman also said he would like to be done with redistricting by December 1 because congressional and state districts will be remapped, causing boundaries of voting precincts, a subdivision of wards, to change. He said the Cook County clerk will want a map of wards and precincts by the congressional primary elections in March 2002.
“One of the real important discussions after we get the district maps for our wards done is what impact they’re going to have on precincts and locations,” Newman said.
