Our View: Hopeless Illinois, where reform goes to die

The Peoria Journal Star
May 7, 2010

There can be but one conclusion from the failure to get redistricting reform on the ballot in Illinois: The vast majority of citizens in the Land of Lincoln like things the way they are with their state government.

They think the people they send to Springfield are, on the whole, doing a superior job with their tax dollars. They believe that politicians picking their voters is far preferable to the opposite, obviously what God intended. They think some of the most gerrymandered districts from sea to shining sea are something to be proud of. They think it's cool that Illinois has a winner-take-all approach to drawing legislative maps, not uncommonly leading to single-party control. They find it quaint how Illinois decides the winner - by drawing a slip of paper from a Lincolnesque stovepipe hat. They especially appreciate, given the lean, mean machine that is state government, that the current system virtually guarantees the election of incumbents - 98 percent of the time, in fact. Did we mention what a fantastic job they're doing?

Sure, Illinois has had its share of corrupt politicians, but that's just the price one pays for having such a great state government. Who wants to be Iowa, which takes the politicians out of it and lets a computer draw the map, producing competitive races and actually giving voters a choice? That's quite unlike Illinois, where nearly half of the legislative races in November have only one name on the ballot, and where if past is prologue, only 4 percent of contested races will be close. Yep, we like our way.

Either that or Illinois has some of the most disengaged citizens in all of America.

It is disappointing in the extreme that the Fair Map Amendment effort has failed to collect the signatures necessary to get the matter on the ballot. It was the fix that made so many others possible - the best path, in our view, to producing a more responsive, more transparent, more competent, more independent, less criminal state government. If it had passed electoral muster, it would have removed the self-serving politicians and their toadies from the map-making process, would not have permitted the drawing of boundaries based on past voting patterns or party registration, would have tried to keep communities together, would have been the most serious reach to date for fairer - not pre-determined - elections.

Alas, Illinoisans wanted no part of any of that. Despite widespread publicity, organizers couldn't even get 4 percent of the some 7.5 million registered voters in Illinois - 282,000 of them - to sign a petition putting the measure on the ballot.

Democrats had an alternative bill - passed in the Senate - Republicans a better one that mirrored the Fair Map proposal, but ultimately, they could not agree, and the GOP couldn't even get its bill called out of committee. So what else is new? Instead we ended up with the worst-case scenario, the status quo, which we'd venture was the preference of the pols in power all along. So what else is new? Illinoisans had their shot, could have controlled their own destiny, but blew it for another 10 years.

Sometimes - make that often - Illinois just seems hopeless. We have written before that we don't need school reform so much as parental reform; likewise, we don't need political reform so much as we need voter reform.

We never thought we'd write this, but we in Illinois deserve the government we have. It begs the question: What is wrong with us?

Thumbs up - To the folks who planted - and obviously keep well-maintained - the welcoming collection of flowers in the traffic island at the intersection of Abington Street and Northeast Madison Ave., the entrance to Peoria's Detweiller Marina Neighborhood.