Chicago, IL Mayor: Monday was the deadline for mayoral candidates to submit the 12,500 signatures they need to make the Feb. 28 nonpartisan primary ballot, but it will be some time before we know exactly how many of the 11 contenders will actually be able to compete next year.
That’s because the period to challenge candidates’ signatures began Tuesday and will last through Dec. 5, and in true Illinois tradition, many contenders and other individuals are already seizing on the chance to knock some foes, including Mayor Lori Lightfoot, off the ballot. The city Board of Elections says it hopes to have a final list by the end of the year.
For now, the field consists of:
State Rep. Kam Buckner
Perennial candidate Frederick Collins
Rep. Chuy García
Activist Ja’Mal Green
Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson
Alderman Sophia King
Mayor Lori Lightfoot
Freelance councilor Johnny Logalbo
Alderman Roderick Sawyer
Former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas
Wealthy perennial candidate Willie Wilson
Almost all of the candidates competing in this dark blue city identify as Democrats, though Wilson took 4% of the vote against Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin as the 2020 candidate of the “Willie Wilson Party.” If no one wins a majority, the top-two vote-getters would advance to a second round on April 4.
But before this group can worry about February, much less April, they need to make sure they have enough valid signatures to proceed in a state where even seasoned politicians can struggle with petitioning. Perhaps most famously, Barack Obama himself won his state Senate seat in 1996 by getting all his Democratic primary foes—including incumbent Alice Palmer—thrown off the ballot for a lack of sufficient signatures.
Twenty years later Rep. Bobby Rush (coincidently the only person to ever beat Obama in an election), only advanced once election officials determined he had just 90 more valid signatures than the minimum 1,300 he needed after a majority were disqualified, though he had no trouble winning renomination afterwards. The 2019 mayoral race’s challenge period also ended the candidacies of Green, Cook County Clerk Dorothy Brown, and several minor contenders.
Most serious candidates will try to collect at least three times the minimum needed to give themselves a cushion, and several say they’ve done just that. Lightfoot, for example, turned in about 40,000 signatures on the final day of qualifying, though that’s not enough to deter her critics. Alderman Brian Hopkins, who is not running for mayor and hasn’t endorsed anyone, says he’s assembled a team to do a basic review of the incumbent’s petitions.
“The fact that she filed at the last minute indicates a possible deficiency in the petitions,” Hopkins told the Chicago Sun-Times, adding, “And there’s no other reason for filing on the last day that makes sense other than she needed that extra week to pad her numbers.”
However, the paper notes that it takes a great deal of time and money to sift through tens of thousands of petitions to try and spot problems, which can include signatures from people who aren’t Chicago voters; a petition from a voter who had already signed a rival candidate’s papers; false names; and wrong addresses. (Obama got Palmer ejected more than a quarter century ago after his supporters noted that, among other things, she’d submitted obviously fake names like “Goo Goo” and “Pookie.”)
Hopkins says he’d only start raising money for what the Sun-Times calls a “full-blown petition challenge” if he finds enough problems to convince him he could succeed in knocking Lightfoot off the ballot, but he’s likely not going to be the only one mulling if this kind of effort is worth it. While Garcia bragged his 48,000 signatures were enough to be “challenge-proof,” his team predicted that Johnson’s allies at the Chicago Teachers Union would try and disqualify the congressman and “as many African American candidates as possible” to make the path easier for Johnson, who is also Black.
Politico’s Shia Kapos also writes that this year was a particularly tough one for petitions, saying that, not only are there fewer election attorneys available to make sure everything is in order, “Voters are more hesitant to sign petitions presented by people they don’t know— a sign, maybe, of the post-Covid culture.”
Election lawyer Burt Odelson, who is helping both Sawyer and Vallas, agreed, and he also noted that things are especially complicated with so many open seat races taking place for the 50-member City Council. He told Kapos, “I’ve been doing this for 50 years, and I think this may be one of the craziest just because of the nature of the mayor’s race and the nature of filling vacancies on City Council.”