Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan still holds the whip hand.

Most of the people of Illinois don't know it, but the opportunity to clean up state government was dealt a serious setback this past week.

The Illinois League of Women Voters announced that its effort to collect enough petition signatures to put the Fair Map Amendment on the fall ballot has failed. "The Illinois Constitution requires close to 300,000 valid signatures and given the likely legal challenge to many of those gathered. ..., and the expense to the State Board of Elections to perform the conformity examination, supporters have decided not to file signatures with the Secretary of Illinois," League President Jan Czarnik said.

The petitions were due on Monday.

What does this mean? In all likelihood, it means the results of most Illinois House and Senate elections for the for the next decade will be determined in advance. The winners will be the members of the political party chosen by Speaker Madigan, the map-drawer-in-chief.

The complicated nature of the redistricting process makes this issue difficult for many people to understand. Here's a thumbnail sketch.

Because of shifting demographics, the state Constitution requires new legislative district boundary lines to be re-drawn every 10 years. So redistricting will be at the top of the priority list for the new Legislature that takes office in 2011.

Under current law, the majority party draws the House and Senate district boundary lines. So Madigan and Co., just as they did in 2001, presumably will draw the lines next year to ensure a strong Democratic majority in both houses. Republican voters will be crammed into a small number of districts while Democratic voters will be spread around liberally to ensure a Democratic majority. Incumbents will become almost invulnerable to challenge because the system has been rigged.

The proposed Fair Map Amendment would have stripped legislators of power to draw their own districts and transferred that authority to an independent committee, whose goal would have been to draw competitive district boundary lines.

What is a competitive district? It's a district in which a candidate of either party has a legitimate chance to win.

State Rep. Naomi Jakobsson's 103rd District, which consists mostly of Champaign-Urbana, is an example of a non-competitive district. She faces no or only token opposition every general election because no Republican has a chance.

Similarly, state Rep. Chapin Rose's 110th District is drawn so that no Democrat can win.

That's the way it is all across the state, and that's why incumbents win 99 percent of the time.

Legislative Democrats already are laying the groundwork for another gerrymander, and only Gov. Pat Quinn can stop them. Being a Democrat, he's not likely to veto a Democratic map. But he issued some encouraging words about the importance of competitive elections.

"I just think the best way to have redistricting is to set up competitive elections that are not gerrymandered to make sure the people have the best representatives. Too often this is an exercise in protecting incumbents of both parties. I don't think that's healthy," Quinn said.

He hit the nail on the head when he said the current system is not healthy.

Frankly, what could be more rotten than the business-as-usual politics of Illinois? Corruption is endemic in our government, and the state is essentially bankrupt. Meanwhile, our legislators are fiddling away their time in Springfield, counting on the fact that they're beyond reach of the voters.

Competitive elections would favor the Republicans because they are not competitive under the current gerrymandered map. But this is not about party, this is about the health of the body politic.

Any majority that is beyond reach becomes arrogant and self-serving. Political parties can only perform their watchdog role on each other if they're in a position to win at the polls.

Unfortunately, politics in Illinois are likely to remain out of balance. Our legislators have no interest in cleaning up their own house, and, with the failure of the Fair Map petition drive, voters won't have the opportunity to do it themselves.