A group continues its push to have Illinois voters weigh-in on changing the way state political districts are drawn. The goal is to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would create an independent committee, instead of lawmakers, to draw legislative maps. Cindy Canary is the executive director of the Independent Maps group. She says they hope to gather twice the required number of valid signatures, which would be about 600,000:
“Sometimes people will sign and they don’t realize they’re not registered to vote in that community, or they’ll use their nickname, or any number of kind of innocent mistakes.”
The League of Women Voters of Greater Peoria presented Canary with more than 1,000 signatures at its meeting last week. The group has until next spring to collect more than 290,000 signatures to get on the November 2016 ballot. It still needs about 15,000 more to hit that mark.