On July 8, 2013, U.S. District Court Judge Robert M. Dow, a George W. Bush appointee, upheld Illinois election laws that require candidates for non-partisan citywide office in Chicago to obtain 12,500 signatures. He also upheld the law that permits only 90 days to get the signatures, and the law that says voters can only sign for one candidate for each office. Stone v Board of Election Commissioners, 10-cv-7727.
The 21-page decision does not even discuss the arguments made by the five candidates who filed the lawsuit. They argued that because Illinois only requires 5,000 signatures to get on a partisan primary ballot for statewide office, it is not logical to require more than 5,000 signatures for Chicago. They also provided evidence that no other city in the United States requires nearly that many signatures for its citywide offices.
Instead of mentioning those points, the decision merely relies on the U.S. Supreme Court’s bad ballot access precedents. The decision does not mention either of the U.S. Supreme Court precedents that struck down old Illinois laws that said candidates in part of the state must get more signatures than statewide candidates. Those precedents were in 1979 (Illinois State Board of Elections v Socialist Workers Party) and 1992 (Norman v Reed).
The decision upholds the 90-day period for gathering signatures on the basis that in 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Texas’ 55-day period in American Party of Texas v White. However, the decision does not mention that Texas had a rational reason for setting a starting date, which was that Texas didn’t want anyone to sign a general election petition if that voter had voted in a partisan primary. In the Chicago case, there is no such factor.
The decision upholds the restriction that says no one can sign for more petition, without acknowledging the practical problem this creates for candidates who are not backed by the Chicago Democratic organization. Sometimes the organization expends all its resources gathering a massive number of signatures for its favored candidates (even though the election is non-partisan), so that it is difficult for other candidates to find a large enough pool of voters who haven’t already signed for the favored candidate. The decision says the ballot access requirements are needed because otherwise ballots would be the size of phone books, a statement that other Illinois judges have made in ballot access cases that bears no relationship to reality. The only jurisdictions with crowded ballots have extremely low or non-existence ballot access barriers. The plaintiffs are appealing.
