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Ives Sues Pritzker Over Illinois Law That Orders Race-Based Legislative Districts

Illinois State Capitol in Springfield, where lawmakers draw the state's legislative districts.

Summary

  • Former state Rep. Jeanne Ives is suing Gov. JB Pritzker and Illinois election officials in federal court to strike down a 2011 state law.
  • The law says legislative districts “shall be drawn” to create districts defined by minority voting power.
  • It is the first case of its kind filed after the Supreme Court’s 2026 Callais ruling on race-based maps, according to the foundation backing her.

What Happened

Jeanne Ives, a Republican former state representative, filed Ives v. Pritzker on May 8, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois with lawyers from the Public Interest Legal Foundation. She sued Pritzker, State Board of Elections Executive Director Bernadette Matthews, and the board itself.

The target is 10 ILCS 120/5-5, which says Illinois legislative and representative districts “shall be drawn” to create “crossover districts, coalition districts, or influence districts.” Each type is defined by the electoral power of a racial or language minority group. The same section makes that rule “subordinate” to the U.S. Constitution and federal law. It governs state legislative maps, not congressional districts.

The complaint says the mandate makes race “a core purpose of all legislative line drawing in Illinois,” in violation of the Fifteenth Amendment and Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act. It quotes Pritzker’s September 2021 statement, made when he signed the current legislative maps, that the state law “preserves clusters of minority voters.”

On November 5, Ives wrote on X that Illinois law “specifically allows for racial gerrymandering.” Briefing on the state’s motions to dismiss closed August 7, and the court had not ruled as of November 8.

The Bigger Picture

The Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais on April 29, 2026, ruling that Louisiana’s congressional map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander because the Voting Rights Act did not require its extra majority-Black district. The foundation calls the Illinois suit the first filed after that decision.

The state’s response: Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s office filed motions to dismiss on July 10. The governor’s brief says Ives lacks standing because she never named her own district, that the law bars race from overriding traditional map rules, and that Callais left the “predominance” test intact. It adds that a three-judge court rejected a similar facial attack on the same law in 2011, and in late 2021 another panel upheld the current maps against Voting Rights Act and equal protection claims. Ives answered that she is challenging the statute itself, not any one map. The lawsuit does not address the partisan map complaints Ives raises on X.

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