What you can do to promote healthy competition in state elections

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At best, almost two-thirds of Chicago area voters will see just one name on the ballot in November when they cast their vote for state senator or state representative.

That’s pretty pathetic.

In a minor flurry of filing before Tuesday’s deadlines, political parties appointed candidates to fill a small percentage of the ballot vacancies, while leaving most of the vacancies open. Even if every one of those newly appointed candidates makes the ballot — gathering sufficient petition signatures and surviving challenges to those signatures — 65 percent of the Chicago area Senate races and 64 percent of the House races still will have just one candidate.

We point this out to lament the state of our democracy, sure. But our real purpose is to stress what you can do about it.

EDITORIAL

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With luck, a proposal to change the way legislative districts are drawn up in Illinois will be on that November ballot, and we cannot urge you strongly enough to vote for the reform. The single biggest reason so many races now are not even races — just that one lone candidate — is that the politicians draw up district boundaries in cockeyed ways to eliminate competition. As the saying goes, the politicians pick their voters, discouraging the other side from even bothering to put up a candidate.

The Independent Map Amendment will appear on the Nov. 8 ballot if it can survive a court challenge, with a hearing set for June 30. The proposed amendment’s supporters have gathered far more than the required number of signatures on petitions to get the amendment on the ballot.

Elections at the Cook County level aren’t affected by this kind of map-drawing gerrymandering, but they also suffer from a discouraging dearth of candidates. Voters will see just one name in every countywide judicial race, for recorder of deeds and for one of the two Board of Review offices that is up.

The Republican Party, in addition, has not bothered to field any candidates for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District’s three six-year terms, when even the Green Party managed to come up with a full slate. (A Republican candidate is running for a two-year unexpired MWRD term.) Maybe the Republicans got discouraged in 2010 when they slated a solid candidate, Paul Chialdikas, who ran a strong campaign and was endorsed by both the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune and wound up with only 12.95 percent of the vote.

To get past one-party rule in races like these, it’s simply up to the voters to do a better job of looking past party labels and actually choosing the best candidate.

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