Next fall, Evanston City Council members may unilaterally reshape Northwestern students’ ability to impact issues like parking costs, landlord-tenant regulations and noise limits, in a once-in-a-decade process few students know about.
That process is redistricting, a democratic system created to ensure equal representation in different levels of government. Every decade, government officials redraw district lines – in Evanston, the boundaries of wards that each elect an alderman – to account for changes in population evident from census data.
Redistricting, however, means more than redrawing new districts to account for changes in population. New maps impact election results for the next 10 years and determine whether or not a group will be properly represented in the government.
Although the deadline for the next process isn’t until 2015, the council will begin discussions about redistricting next fall, shortly after they receive data from this year’s census, City Manager Wally Bobkiewicz said. And if the past is any indication, the strength of NU’s vote may be at stake.
The last time ward boundaries were drawn, in 2003, NU was at the forefront of disenfranchisement issues after the council debated whether the student voting bloc should be protected. Early proposals suggested that NU’s campus be divided into three different wards, raising questions on whether students should be considered a “community of interest,” whose votes are pooled together in the redistricting process to ensure impact.
If a similar attempt is made in the next redistricting process, NU students will have less of an impact in choosing an alderman who can voice their concerns to the council. If their vote gets split among different wards, they lose their ability to choose a representative that will fight for the issues that affect them most.
“It’s important to have full representation of citizenry,” said George Mitchell, president of the Evanston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “Otherwise, the interest of one group may not be adequately represented in government.”
A ‘community of interest’?
Two of Evanston’s nine wards currently have jurisdiction over NU’s campus: buildings to the east of Sheridan Road are part of the seventh ward, and those to the west are part of the first ward. The second, fourth and fifth wards cover off-campus territory.
Prior to the last redistricting, a larger portion of campus was located in the first ward, including North Campus dorms and fraternity houses. During the process, however, former Ald. Arthur Newman (1st) proposed a map that shifted the sororities and dorms nearby from the first ward to the second ward, thus splitting up the student vote.
“There was no question that the map had a huge number of students in the first ward,” Newman said. “I came up with a map which I thought would be fair to everybody.”
Jane Lee (WCAS ‘05) saw things differently. Lee, then-external relations chair for Associated Student Government, thought Newman was trying to dilute the student vote. Upon hearing of his plans, she wanted to familiarize herself with what redistricting entailed and what it meant for students.
Eventually she decided she had to “make sure our voices get heard,'” Lee said.
For Lee, the greatest obstacle was to convince the council that students should be a protected voting bloc, a perennial debate amongst aldermen. Under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, minority groups cannot be disenfranchised, so they, as a voting bloc, are protected during redistricting.
“You can’t limit the voting power of an identifiable group,” said Jeff Smith (WCAS ‘77), a local attorney. “Students have not been given that protection historically, but the same principles should apply.”
But for many aldermen in 2003, students were not a community of interest. Newman cites students’ low voter turnout at municipal elections as a reason why.
“The rate of turnout of students has always been very low,” Newman said. “Students tend to be more interested in national elections than local ones.”
Smith, on the other hand, said he believes low voter turnout is a symptom, rather than a rationale.
“It actually cuts the other way around,” said Smith, who ran for Democratic state representative in January. “A lack of voter turnout indicates a feeling of hopelessness on the part of an identifiable voting minority. People get involved when they feel their vote is meaningful. You can’t prejudge the mind of the voter.”
Other aldermen also brought up students’ transience in the last debate. Students are only here for four years, many said, and they are not permanent residents of Evanston.
But former Ald. Edmund Moran (6th) said the time a voter lives in the city shouldn’t matter.
“Your ability to influence the outcome of elections depends not on qualifications like how long you’ve been here, who you are, what your job is and how much money you make,” Moran said. “The plumber gets as an important vote as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
Counting Evanston
Aside from determining whether NU is a community of interest, the last redistricting sparked a broader discussion on how ward populations would be counted. Wards are required to be of mostly equal population, but in 2003 the council debated what number they should use for the population: the count of citizens of voting age or the count of all citizens.
The state of Illinois provides that population counts should be based on total population, but the city attempted to base it on citizens age 18 and older, Mitchell said.
For NU, the population count was the deciding factor on how the campus would be divided. Because the campus has a large number of voters age 18 and older, if the citizens of voting age count was used, NU wards would have to be split up so the wards would have equal populations.
Ultimately, the “one person, one vote” criterion was used, counting all citizens in the new map, said Ald. Lionel Jean-Baptiste (2nd).
“In counting the overall population instead of just the 18-and-over population, we were then able to have some equity,” said Jean-Baptiste, who created the current ward map in 2003.
Another problem in 2003 was the lack of citizen input during the process. Lee, who led NU’s fight for representation, said one of her major priorities during the debacle was to help students better understand the redistricting process.
“The process itself wasn’t very timely nor transparent,” Lee said. “They wanted to push redistricting through during the summer, when students weren’t here, and I thought we didn’t have a seat at the table in their discussions.”
Lee said she talked to other residents who were passionate about the issue, and together they formed a redistricting committee of Evanston residents. She said she also submitted her own map to show aldermen that it is possible to have equal population in the wards without splitting the NU vote into three.
In the end, Lee thinks they were successful.
“We were able to get our majority wards,” she said.
Brighter prospects
Current aldermen seem to be more sympathetic towards students’ interest this time, especially with the improved relations between NU and Evanston. Still, some council members remain uncertain on whether to consider NU students a community of interest.
Jean-Baptiste said he does not believe so because students’ interests are always changing.
“Students are not always mobilizing around particular issues,” he said.
Ald. Jane Grover (7th), who included redistricting in her campaign platform in 2009, said while she is uncertain about the specifics of how redistricting will affect NU students, she does hope to bring students into the process.
“It’s important to include Northwestern students, because they are residents of this
city,” Grover said.
The power of participation
Grover added, however, that while she vows to ensure students will be represented in the next redistricting process, she cannot do it alone. Students need to engage themselves in city government and city issues, she said.
Student and resident participation would be necessary to ensure that the upcoming redistricting process is fair and inclusive, Smith said.
“All processes work better when there’s more diverse representation,” Smith said. “This is the municipal government that will be hanging over a student’s head for five or six years – longer in the case of those who go on to graduate school.”
NU’s participation in the census was a great start toward student involvement in city affairs, said Lucile Krasnow, special assistant for community relations for NU. Ninety-eight percent of students living on campus filled out census forms early this year, bringing in about $48 million for the city of Evanston.
While the council has not yet put redistricting on the agenda, the critical moment for students to make an impact is in November. Evanston Mayor Elizabeth Tisdahl said she remains unsure on whether to call students a voting bloc but offers a suggestion on how to change her mind and that of the rest of the council.
“If you want to make an argument to be a protected voting bloc, then get out there and vote,” Tisdahl said.
Ethan Merel, ASG’s external relations vice president, said the first step they are taking in terms of getting involved with redistricting is to ensure that students participate in the elections this year.
During the last year’s elections, student voter turnout dropped by 65 percent from the 2008 elections.
“With the upcoming 2010 election, we want to show that NU cares about the election and the issues,” he said. “If we don’t get them out in the polls, and they’re not interested in the issues, there’s no political sway that will help us convince City Council that we do care.”
Student participation, however, should not end there, Merel said. Lee paved the way to ensure the redistricting process is fair, transparent and inclusive, and so students can participate in the next process.
“A campus-wide effort is really the only way we will be able to make an impact,” he said. “It’s going to take the over 8,000 people on this campus to really make this happen.”
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