By Ted Kleine
In 1980, political agitator Pat Quinn collected over 477,000 signatures to put his “Cutback Amendment” on the ballot. It proposed to replace the 177-member house with 118 representatives elected from single-member districts. The assembly had just given itself a big pay increase, so voters loved the idea of firing 59 legislators at one stroke. The amendment passed by a two-thirds majority. The “Big House,” as the old legislature was nicknamed, was dead. So was cumulative voting.
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Representative Sara Feigenholtz doesn’t have much in common with A. Webber Borchers, but she’s trying to bring back the system that made him possible. Feigenholtz, a Chicago Democrat, is sponsoring a constitutional amendment that would divide Illinois into 39 districts, which would each elect three representatives, chosen by cumulative voting.
“Certainly having people from Chicago in the Republican conference meant that people from the collar counties and downstate got to hear our concerns,” said Catania, who lost her seat after the Cutback Amendment was passed. “It gave us a chance to explain the Chicago point of view, so there was less hostility on the floor.”
Now almost all Republicans come from the suburbs and farm counties, and almost all Democrats come from Chicago and southern Illinois. The legislature is polarized along regional lines, and house speaker Michael Madigan and minority leader Lee Daniels ride herd over their members, because each controls the party machine in his quarter of the state.
Pat Quinn, father of the Cutback Amendment, doesn’t agree that the system was more democratic in the old days. For one thing, he says, Republicans in Democratic districts often rode in with the support of under 10 percent of the voters. The west side of Chicago produced legislators with names like Capuzi and Margalus. As a result, blacks were underrepresented. Hispanics weren’t represented at all. If the old system were revived, it undoubtedly would violate the Voting Rights Act, Quinn said.
“The governor just believes that since three-member districts were done away with, the people have lost a measure of representation,” Urbanek said. “Under the old system, more issues were judged by their merit, rather than on partisan politics.”
