Lightfoot: Give Preckwinkle a ‘bag of coal’ for bad-faith petition challenges

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As far as mayoral candidate Lori Lightfoot is concerned, Toni Preckwinkle’s challenges to Lightfoot’s nomination petitions are not only wrong and a waste of money — they are contributing to a lack of holiday cheer for elections staff.

Lightfoot, the former head of the Police Board, filed a motion to dismiss rival Preckwinkle’s challenges and also suggested Monday Preckwinkle should ditch the challenges altogether.

And she blamed her mayoral rival for making employees of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners have to work over the holidays as they race to verify candidates and finalize a ballot for the upcoming Feb. 26 election.

“They’re going to be working on Christmas Eve,” Lightfoot said Monday. “Merry Christmas, Toni Preckwinkle. We should just give her a bag of coal.”

The Preckwinkle campaign has challenged about 23,700 of the 32,575 signatures Lightfoot filed to get on the ballot.

The Cook County Board president says signatures Lightfoot filed include some from unregistered voters and non-Chicago residents, as well as duplicates and some that have incomplete addresses. Others are forgeries, her campaign says.

The Preckwinkle campaign dropped a more explosive charge that some of Lightfoot’s circulators’ signature sheets demonstrate a “pattern of fraud.” She argued that any mistakes her own campaign made in filing the challenges were from “bleary-eyed” staff working at 3 a.m. and said the challenges were made in good faith.

Lightfoot’s campaign says Preckwinkle’s challenges contradict each other and in some cases cite lines on her petitions that were blank or didn’t contain a signature. She said some objections appear to have been filed after computer software was used to analyze the petitions, but the challenges weren’t later verified by a human being.

“It is a game. It is silly. It is not brought in good faith,” Lightfoot said. She also said it was a waste of tax dollars.

Preckwinkle’s campaign declined to respond to Lightfoot’s statements. But when asked in an interview with the Sun-Times last week about the petition challenges — which include objections to candidate Susana Mendoza — Preckwinkle said: “If you can’t get yourself organized and have sufficient support across the city to get the required minimum number of signatures how on earth can you govern?”

It costs the city about $1 million to handle the overall petition process, a spokesman for the Board of Election Commissioners confirmed, including Preckwinkle’s challenges. Taxpayers cover the cost of preparations for filing, hearing officers, court reporters and staff overtime.

“To say the entire objection process is wrong would be misleading,” spokesman Jim Allen said.

And with the election, yes, employees work on Christmas Eve.

“Other than the three major holidays of the season this is a seven-day operation for us,” Allen said.

Election attorneys for both campaigns will reconvene for another hearing on Friday.