Your vote is your voice.

So when Democrats in the General Assembly rigged the legislative maps to favor themselves, they violated your First Amendment right to free expression, the League of Women Voters of Illinois says in an intriguing federal lawsuit. The suit asks the court to throw out the maps.

It's the third legal challenge filed against the maps, which were signed into law earlier this year by Gov. Pat Quinn, also a Democrat. Quinn declared the maps "fair" and "competitive," even as Republicans howled in protest and Democrats danced a victory jig.

The Statehouse map includes at least a dozen districts in which two or even three Republican incumbents are roped together, forcing them to run against each other while Democrats sail to victory in friendly districts drawn just for them.

The congressional map is designed to flip the state's Washington delegation from 11-8 Republican to 12-6 Democratic. (Illinois is losing a seat because its population is down in the 2010 U.S. census.) That egregiously gerrymandered map prompted Politico.com to pronounce that House Speaker Michael Madigan, the state's top Democrat, had "punched his ticket to the partisan hall of fame."

The first two challenges, filed by aggrieved Republicans, focus mostly on the claim that the maps fall short of the protections afforded to African-Americans and Latinos under the federal Voting Rights Act. It's an argument courts historically have taken very seriously.

But getting a map thrown out because it favors one party over another is generally a lost cause. Legislative maps are inherently political, and complaints about partisan gerrymandering are invariably dismissed with the old line about victors and spoils.

The U.S. Supreme Court has heard only two cases — in 1986 and 2004 — based on claims of politically motivated redistricting, and the rulings haven't been especially helpful. At the risk of oversimplifying: The Supreme Court recognizes that partisan gerrymandering might violate the U.S. Constitution. But neither of the cases it has heard identified a constitutional standard that could be applied, and the court didn't offer one, either.

Both of the cases claimed that deliberately diluting an opposing party's voting strength violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection provision. In the 2004 case, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy hinted that the First Amendment might be a better button to push.

Let's have a go at it, then.

The League of Women Voters makes a convincing argument that by sorting residents into districts based on how they're expected to vote, lawmakers manipulate the opinions that are expressed and heard in those districts. As a result, "voters in Illinois seldom have real choices in our elections," League President Jan Dorner said.

The lawsuit asks the court to declare that drawing maps based on the political views or voting histories of residents for the purpose of securing a partisan advantage violates the First Amendment. It asks the court to invalidate the maps, and to order the governor and General Assembly to come up with a redistricting process that isn't based on self-serving political interests.

It's asking the court to make new law, in other words. The league spent most of last year trying to accomplish that through legislative channels. It didn't happen, for obvious reasons.

Fair representation is supposed to be the goal of legislative mapmaking. Partisan gerrymandering hijacks that process, allowing political power brokers — not voters — to pick winners and losers. By rearranging the map to place your vote where it suits their needs, politicians stifle your voice. Is it any wonder your lawmakers listen to their party leaders instead of to you?