Chicago ballot petition challenges at 40-year low

Every municipal election, candidates, lawyers and election officials alike gear up for a weekslong slog of resolving dozens — even hundreds, in some years — of nominating petition challenges, a longstanding Chicago tradition to knock candidates off the ballot.

But many were surprised this election cycle to find things were much quieter than they had expected.

Just 113 objections were filed against candidates’ nominating petitions for the 2023 municipal election. That’s the lowest number for a municipal election since 1983, when 105 objections were filed, according to a WBEZ analysis of data from the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners.

“I think everybody was surprised at how few challenges there were,” said longtime Chicago election attorney Michael Dorf.

The 2023 municipal election includes newly created three-person civilian oversight councils for each of the city’s 22 police districts. Excluding the objections for candidates seeking these new offices, there were a combined total of just 84 objections in mayoral, aldermanic, city clerk and city treasurer races, making it the lowest total for such races in the last 40 years, including 1983, the earliest year for which data were available.

“Certainly we were prepared for a lot more objections given the history and how many we generally received each municipal election cycle in the past, especially with the new elected office,” said Max Bever, director of public information for the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners.

The election board, which consists of three commissioners appointed by the Circuit Court of Cook County, has the final vote on objection cases. The board is aiming to wrap up decisions on all the cases by mid-January, pending any remaining cases where the decision is appealed and goes up to the circuit courts, Bever said.

The city’s municipal general election will be held Feb. 28. Runoff elections, for races where no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, will be held April 4.

There’s no definitive reason for the dip in objection cases this election cycle.

Dorf said he thinks it’s because “people are tired of the gamesmanship.” He has represented candidates and objectors for more than 20 years and is representing Mayor Lori Lightfoot this year.

The amount of time and money that goes into objections can be draining for campaigns, Dorf said. And, in some cases, objections “are filed by people who know that they’re not going to win, and they do it in order to take away resources from the candidate they’re challenging,” he said.

Dorf said other election lawyers have told him they’ve started to take a harder stance on objection cases, even telling some clients they won’t file an objection if they believe the case is frivolous or won’t prevail.

“Those days are waning,” said Burt Odelson, an election attorney with more than 50 years of experience. “The hearing officers and the electoral boards who are hearing these cases are not allowing those frivolous objections to stand anymore, so really what you’re doing is wasting your own time, as well as your candidate’s time.”

Another theory is that fewer incumbents running means fewer objections filed. There are 11 wards where there is no incumbent running this year.

“To file a meaningful objection, you need to probably have both a team of people to go over the petitions and lawyers,” said Dick Simpson, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois Chicago and a former two-term alderperson. “If you’re a first-time candidate, you’re probably mostly hoping just to get on the ballot yourself and not trying to knock anyone off.”

To get on the ballot, candidates need to have a minimum number of valid signatures from registered voters on their nominating petitions. The minimum varies by office: 12,500 signatures for mayor, city clerk and treasurer; 473 signatures for alderperson; and at least 0.5% of the number of registered voters in the district for police district council races.

Once candidates submit their nominating petitions, objectors — any registered voter in Chicago for citywide elections or who live within the respective ward or district — have a week to comb through petitions and identify reasons to throw out a candidate’s signatures.

The most common allegations are related to signatures: They aren’t genuine, they don’t belong to registered voters who live in the district, voters signed petitions for multiple candidates in the same ward and so on. Hundreds of signatures can get disqualified en masse because the pages on which they appear were not consecutively numbered. A full sheet of signatures can also be nullified if the sheet was not properly notarized or if it contained designations of a candidate’s political party. Such designations are prohibited on nonpartisan municipal election nominating petitions.

Candidates can also get knocked for not filing their Statement of Economic Interest with the county clerk, but in many cases it comes down to how many valid signatures they have remaining after going through hearings and records exams.

If enough signatures are deemed ineligible, it could drop a candidate’s total of valid signatures below the minimum required and disqualify them.

“It’s usually for mistakes that rookies make, or [because] they simply don’t have enough resources to get enough petition signatures,” Simpson said.

Each objection filing is assigned a case number and often goes through several hearings in front of a hearing officer. It’s a process that often stretches over weeks. Once it’s complete, the hearing officer writes a recommendation to the election commissioners.

In the 2015 municipal election, roughly half the candidates who filed petitions faced objections, and nearly one-third of them didn’t make the ballot, according to a WBEZ analysis. In 2019, nearly half the candidates who filed petitions faced objections, and about one-fifth of them were removed from the ballot.

Challenging candidate nominating petitions is a tradition as old as Chicago politics.

“There’s a very famous saying … politics ain’t beanbag. And in Chicago, it’s hardball politics, and you have to be prepared to fail and fend off not only challenges but other problems,” Simpson said.

Examples abound of alderpersons, many supported by the Democratic Party machine, who ran unopposed because all their challengers got booted off the ballot.

In 2003, longtime Ald. Bill Beavers (7th), a machine ally, ran unopposed after one of his campaign workers, Irene Smith, successfully kicked off all six of Beavers’ challengers. In 2015, Ald. George Cardenas (12th) ran unopposed after two of his supporters successfully removed challenger and union organizer Pete DeMay from the ballot.

Mayoral race objections can get pretty heated. In Rahm Emanuel’s first run for mayor in 2011, his candidacy drew more than 30 objections, including one that spurred a notorious challenge to Emanuel’s Chicago residency. Overall, 2011 drew more than 400 objections — the most of any municipal election in the last 40 years. As Dorf recalls, it was a year that was “awful for all of us.”

Even former President Barack Obama used petition challenges to knock off all his rivals, including longtime Chicago activist and incumbent state Sen. Alice Palmer, to ease his path to claim a state Senate spot in 1996.

Amy Qin/WBEZ