The Chicago Tribune has this article in its November 17 edition, about the Illinois system for determining if candidate petitions are valid or not. New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, are the only three states in the country in which tradition and habits say it is legitimate and normal for candidates to challenge the primary ballot access petitions of their rivals, so as to eliminate those rivals from primary ballots. Most states don’t even use petitions for candidate ballot access to partisan primaries. And in many of the states that do use petitions to control access to the primary ballot, elections officials check those petitions in a fair, apolitical, competent manner, and challenges aren’t part of the system.
And even in the handful of other states that do use petitions for primary ballot access, and technically depend on the challenge system, the norm is that such petitions never get challenged. One example of such a state is Wisconsin.
Newspapers in New York frequently criticize the challenge system in that state, but it is somewhat rare for Illinois newspapers to make such criticisms, so this article is welcome. The article points out that petition challenges in Illinois primaries are becoming more and more common, perhaps because access to the voter registration rolls is easier than it has been, partly because of the internet.
Perhaps this is becoming more common in Illinois is because Barack Obama won his state legislative races by challenging the petitions of opponents. In these elections, he then ran unopposed. That is my understanding.
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Yes, this is how BHO got his State Senate Seat in Il. The incumbent (Alice Palmer) resigned to run in the 2nd Congressional Special Election to replace Mel Reynolds who was going to jail. BHO was groomed by Palmer to be her replacement in the State Senate. BHO announces he is going to run for the State Senate seat and starts his campaign. Alice Palmer gets trounced in the Congressional Primary and then announces that she is going to run to replace herself in the State Senate seat she left to run for Congress. BHO uses the petition challenge system to have her and 3 other opponents knocked off the ballot so he can run for the State enate seat unnoposed.
Yes, candidates have been knocked off the ballot for such idiotic things as not numbering petition pages, or not having the petitions attached to each other properly and so forth.
Interestingly, it seems that alot of this nonsense occurs in inner city, oftentimes poor and minority districts. The districts that need the best representation are often the ones caught up in this meaningless political tit for tat. Case in point this year is Il-32. It includes the impoverished Englewood community on Chicago’s South Side. There are four candidates running in the Democratic primary. There are presently 9 ballot challenges between the candidates, with all four candidates getting at least 1 challenge. The incumbent is challenging each of his opponents, and one of the non-incumbents is challenging all the other opponents. It’s a completely ridiculous situation created by selfish and self-serving individuals.
Don’t let me get into the Ricky Hendon-Art Turner thing on the West Side either. Again an area in need of decent representation is instead represented by bankrupt public officials who want to use political tomfoolery to procect their careers, their income, and their perks.
The whole petition challenge system as is is not a whole lot more than a tool for partisan hacks to eliminate competition to their slated candidates. There are indeed legitimate challenges, but IMHO the majority of them are useless political nonsense.
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