Alton, Illinois, holds a partisan city election on April 4, 2017. An independent candidate for Mayor, Danny Rauschkolb, filed a petition but that petition has been challenged. No one alleges he lacks enough valid signatures. But the challengers say he can’t run as an independent because he filed a petition to run in the Democratic primary for the same office earlier. That petition was rejected because he didn’t include a receipt showing he had filed a statement of economic interests.
This article explains the details. Illinois voter registration forms do not ask applicants for a choice of party, or whether the applicant is an independent. Therefore the challengers’ reliance on the U.S. Supreme Court opinion Storer v Brown is not fully relevant. Storer v Brown upheld a California law that required independent candidates not to have been registered members of a qualified party, but California had partisan registration.
ALL elections for executive and judicial officers should be nonpartisan.
i.e. have all legislators on all sides blast such officers when they mess up — i.e. when they are LAWLESS.
Demo Rep… name a single modern democracy that has non-partisan elections for executive offices…
Most city regimes in the USA have nonpartisan executive officers and manage to survive
— an election reform from the *progressive era — circa 1890-1917 (before REACTIONARY stuff happened due to World War I and Great Depression I).