In May the General Assembly quietly approved a bill that cut in half the number of petition signatures a Chicago mayoral candidate needs to make the ballot, from 25,000 to 12,500. The backers of the bill, which Governor Blagojevich is expected to sign, say it makes the city’s election law fairer, but local independents aren’t rejoicing. “If they say it’s reform don’t believe them,” says Jay Stone, a political activist whose father is 50th Ward alderman Bernard Stone. “The election laws are there to help incumbents stay in power.”
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Independents immediately attacked the legislation. Requiring 25,000 signatures “really isn’t very logical at all,” says Frank Avila, a lawyer and independent political activist. “There are many more people in Illinois than in Chicago.” And many more in New York City, where a mayoral candidate needs only 7,000 signatures.
The suit charged that the 25,000-signature requirement was so difficult to meet it effectively denied candidates access to the ballot. All four plaintiffs made the 2003 ballot, but only because Daley didn’t challenge any of their petition signatures. He probably could have knocked all of them off the ballot if he had–Avila readily concedes that none of them had 25,000 signatures, much less 25,000 legitimate ones. No one counts the signatures unless someone challenges them, and Daley didn’t challenge them because he didn’t need to.
Most observers assume the 25,000 requirement was cut to benefit Daley. “Let’s be realistic, if they [Daley and Madigan] didn’t want it to happen it wouldn’t have happened,” says one election-law expert who works for the Democratic Party. “So certainly they were for it. I’m not sure why.”
Of course Daley’s opponents can challenge his petitions just as easily, but most observers say that’s a hopeless cause. “You can’t knock Daley off–they know what they’re doing,” says Stone. “Each precinct captain goes door-to-door and collects signatures and reports to the district leader, who reports to a ward secretary. They check those signatures against the polling sheet. Each page has to be notarized. They don’t even have the same notaries notarize every page–God forbid there’s some problem with one particular notary.”
