The Blog

How about that people are satisfied with their government ?

If things were as bad as the naysayers would have you believe, challengers should have no trouble getting 16,000 lousy signatures out of millions of people that live in the county.

It DOES seem odd, however, that 8,000 are needed for a county race but for a state-wide race (US Senate), one only needs 10,000.

How does it even happen that 1/2 of the signatures can get invalidated? Is this through individual signature invalidation, or is it happening forms at a time, or all the forms collected by a person at a time?

The obscenely-high signature requirement is an unfortunate byproduct of the 2008 slaughter of Republican candidates here in Cook County. The county office signature requirement is based on a percentage of the vote of your party's top votegetter in the last General Election (and in 2008, it wasn't Obama who topped the ticket countywide; Dick Durbin edged him out in trouncing that political tomato can he was up against). The requirement for a statewide candidate in a flat 5,000 minimum (I think only 3,000 for US Senator).

As for signatures being invalidated, there are several legitimate reasons why they would be voided. The person may have fotton to reregister after moving. The person may have signed another petition for that office (with the other guy's petition having been notarized on an earlier date). Or the person might have signed petitions for candidates of more than one party (for instance, if you signed the Green Party petitions for County Board President). And then we are not even going into the problems found in the petitions themselves, the most lethal of which is not numbering the petition pages properly.

It isn't fair, but it shows the need for election law reform. Unfortunately, there is no chance of that taking place while Mike Madigan reamins as Speaker of the Illinois House and State Democratic Party Chairman.

Out of curiosity, Fedup Dem...Hypothetically, If an incumbent were to have filed a petition with a single unnumbered petition sheet (page 23 according to where it should have been placed and numbered) and also included various photocopied petitions which were numbered, would that incumbents’ petition be thrown out completely? You seem to be very knowledgeable in the area of election law and I would love to know your opinion on it. Hypothetically of course :)

I spent a little time down at the Cook County Board of Elections this week. A State Rep candidate submitted a petition with 600+ signatures for a seat that required 500. I was astonished to see how many of the people who signed were not registered at the address they provided. There were other problems with the petition, minor things like a few wives who obviously signed for their husbands, but nothing huge and scandalous, nothing approaching wholesale fraud; just many, many registration errors that added up to not enough valid signatures to qualify.

Signature collection is an object lesson in Murphy's Law - Everything that can go wrong, will.

This thing with Raila keeps getting promoted as some sort of anti-democratic tragedy, but that's completely backwards. There is a solution to the bad signature problem: have huge numbers of volunteers out getting signatures, so you turn in 30K instead of 12K. That's about as democratic a process at you could find. Raila didn't get thrown out on some little, obscure technicality, she got thrown out because she didn't have enough volunteers working for her. In other words, lack of popular support led to her non-election.

She seems like a good candidate, so I hope she dusts herself off and gets back to coalition-building, gathers some new volunteer corps, and maybe runs again in the near future.

I am not running for office, a politician, or analyst, but I am an active volunteer in Rogers Park, Chicago, Illinois for the past 3-4 years. Seems to me, the honest and hard-working citizen will never get ahead. There used to be a "John Wayne" type honest, moral, hard work ethic in the US, but it all has been lost thru the years of recession and the influence of big businesses who dictate not only the players, but also the playing field. President O'Bama suggested we change all that and ask the average citizen what we want and need?
So, how do we get the average citizen to speak up, and even, volunteer their abilities and skills to getting what we want accomplished? How about a clear "Vision" of what we need and want fulfilled? What is that? Angels playing harps? social justice? Seems to me a "silent revolution" of passionate visionaries and volunteers can change things in how government at any level works. Why is it that the "how to" and the education needed to change things is out of the grasp of the average, honest, moralistic, hard-working citizen? I believe it is simply because we let them get away with it~ Try to think of our nation and localities as a family. Democrat and Republican are like two brothers fighting. What is the good parent going to do? That is the key to what we need most, good parents in government who can see thru all the fluff and see we are all one and the same family who want one and the same things -- peace and harmony. Not to mention that our basic needs have to be met in the meantime,which is not happening right now for many Americans. Let's untie, and silently invite others to volunteer to help the nonprofits already fighting lovingly for the socail justice we all need/want. Nothing else matters much if we all do not have "peace of mind." And food, shelter, medicine, etc., within our reach. What do we need? What do we want? You tell me. I'm taking a survey!