Cynthia Soto has served two terms as the Democratic state representative in the Fourth Legislative District, which covers the Humboldt Park area. She’s running for reelection with several thousand dollars in her campaign chest and the support of all the area committeemen, who’ll be dispatching dozens of precinct captains on her behalf come election day. Kathy Cummings, a Green Party candidate, is a retired CPS teacher running in her first race, with no campaign money to speak of and little more than a handful of volunteers. Soto would have been likely to clobber Cummings in the November 7 election under any circumstances. Even so, house speaker Michael Madigan unleashed his ace election-law specialist to knock Cummings off the ballot.
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Democrats and Republicans already hold a big advantage over third-party candidates, thanks to quirks in the state’s election laws, which are of course drafted by Democrats and Republicans. According to the law, regular party candidates for state rep only need 500 valid signatures to make the ballot. Third-party candidates, on the other hand, need to gather 5 percent of the turnout in the last election. Unfortunately, the law is so clumsily written it isn’t exactly clear what that means. The Democrats, backed by the election board, say Cummings needs 1,531 signatures–5 percent of her district’s ballots in the 2004 presidential election. Cummings argues that she only needs 1,119 signatures, 5 percent of all district ballots cast in the 2004 state representative race.
For the first round of the challenge–the so-called binder check–Kasper, Cummings, and a hearing officer sat in a warehouselike room in a downtown county building for about a week, reviewing hundreds of nominating petitions. According to Kasper, the majority of the signatures on Cummings’s petitions failed to match the signatures on the voter registration cards. He convinced the hearing officer to knock just shy of 2,000 signatures from her petitions and remove Cummings from the ballot.
Kasper shrugs. “She’s gone from the ballot,” he says. “She appealed, the appeal was dismissed. There’s really not much more to say.”
Meanwhile, there’s a chance the move against Cummings may wind up damaging Governor Blagojevich. Kasper had been working with Blagojevich’s lawyers to keep the statewide Green Party off the ballot when Madigan dispatched him to help Soto. To almost everyone’s surprise, the Greens won the statewide case: in August the party was certified to field a full slate in November’s gubernatorial election. Should the Greens cost Blagojevich the race against Judy Baar Topinka, the Republicans will have Madigan to thank. “Madigan put in the second-string lawyers for the state case, and he put in the first string, Kasper, against Kathy,” says Esler with a wry smile. “We drew fire away from the state legal fight.”
