The Illinois General Assembly was created by the first
Illinois Constitution adopted in 1818. The candidates for office split into political parties in the 1830s, initially as the Democratic and
Whig parties, until the Whig candidates reorganized as Republicans in the 1850s.
Abraham Lincoln began his political career in the Illinois House of Representatives as a member of the Whig party in 1834. He served there until 1842. Although Republicans held the majority of seats in the Illinois House after 1860, in the next election it returned to the Democrats. The Democratic Party-led legislature worked to frame a new state constitution that was ultimately rejected by voters In 1980 Illinois was divided into 118 single-member districts. Since then each has used the
first-past-the-post voting election system. From 1870 to 1980, Illinois's lower house had several unique features: • The House had 153, later 177 members. The state was divided into 51, then later 59 legislative districts, each of which elected one senator and three representatives. • Elections for the state house were conducted using
cumulative voting; each individual voter was given three votes to cast for House seats, and they could distribute them to three candidates (one vote each), one candidate (receiving three votes—this was called a
bullet vote) or two candidates (each receiving 1½ votes). (The only historic exception to the universal use of cumulative voting 1870-1980 was the
1964 state-wide at-large election.) • Though not constitutionally mandated, the two parties had an informal agreement that they would only run two candidates per district. Thus, in most districts, only four candidates were running for three seats. This not only all but guaranteed that the district's minority party would win a seat (particularly outside Chicago), but usually assured that each party would have significant representation—a minimum of one-third of the seats (59 out of 177)—in the House. (The only historic exception to the minimum 59 seat rule was in 1875 and during WWI.)
Cutback Amendment of 1980 The
Cutback Amendment was proposed to abolish Illinois's use of Cumulative Voting and multi-member districts. Since its passage in 1980, representatives have been elected from 118 single-member districts formed by dividing the 59 Senate districts in half, a method known as
nesting. Each senator is "associated" with two representatives. Since the adoption of the Cutback Amendment, there have been proposals by some major political figures in Illinois to bring back multi-member districts. A task force led by former governor
Jim Edgar and former federal judge
Abner Mikva issued a report in 2001 calling for the revival of cumulative voting, in part because it appears that such a system increases the representation of racial minorities in elected office. The
Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1995 that the multi-member districts elected with cumulative voting produced better legislators. Others said the now-abandoned system produced greater stability in the lower house. The
Democratic Party won a majority of House seats in 1982. Except for a brief two-year period of Republican control from 1995 to 1997, the Democrats have held the majority since then.
Firsts The first two African-American legislators in
Illinois were
John W. E. Thomas, first elected in 1876, and
George French Ecton, elected in 1886. In 1922,
Lottie Holman O'Neill became the first woman elected to the Illinois House of Representatives (she was elected in the first election in which women could vote or run for election). In 1958,
Floy Clements became the first African American woman to serve as state Representative. In 1982,
Joseph Berrios became the first Hispanic American state representative.
Theresa Mah became the first Asian American to serve in the Illinois House when she was sworn into office January 10, 2017. On January 11, 2023, Abdelnasser Rashid and Nabeela Syed became the first representatives in the Illinois General Assembly of Muslim faith, with Rashid becoming the first Palestinian-American representative to serve in the Illinois legislative body. ==Powers==