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This morning the dailies reported that supporters of William “Dock” Walls have challenged the ballot petitions submitted by Mayor Daley’s campaign. Walls and his backers charge that forgeries and the names of unregistered voters were illegally included among the 24,000-plus signatures the Daley campaign submitted to the Board of Election Commissioners for the City of Chicago. “I don’t expect Daley to stay on the ballot,” Walls proclaimed to the Sun-Times. But since only 12,500 signatures are needed to run for mayor, the Walls team will have to show that nearly half of the Daley signatures don’t count.
Call it friends helping friends or call it patronage, but of the 93 people who filed petition challenges by yesterday’s deadline, 21 had names that also appear on the city payroll, including nine people listed as staffers for aldermen or City Council committees. Not one of the city workers was involved in a challenge to a sitting official.
