Consider two candidates for the state legislature. One, an incumbent whose father happens to be one of Chicago’s most powerful aldermen, appears to have violated election law. The other, a political rookie taking on an incumbent, has sworn affidavits from voters attesting that he played by the rules. Guess which candidate will be on the ballot for the February 2 Democratic primary—and which won’t?
Her opponent, Joe Laiacona, a computer science teacher at Columbia College and the proprietor of LeatherViews.com, pounced, claiming she wasn’t ballot-eligible because her candidacy statement includes false information. “She said she was registered on Melrose and she wasn’t,” he says. “It was an open-and-shut case.”
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And how did this “open-and-shut case” go Mell’s way? Well, according to Goodman’s reading, “There is no express requirement in . . . the election code that specifically requires that a candidate be a registered or qualified voter,” Goodman wrote. “Even if there is an implied requirement that a candidate be a registered or qualified voter, there is no requirement that the candidate be registered to vote at the address listed on the candidate’s nomination.”
“I still can’t believe that ruling,” he says. If the law requires that Mell sign an oath attesting to the truth of everything in her statement, he wonders, how could the board determine it didn’t matter whether the address was accurate? To him it was a little like a suspect going on trial for bludgeoning someone to death with a brick, only to have the judge let him go free because the state bans murder but not specifically bludgeoning.
“I’m sensitive to this issue. I think that everyone has a right to run—but I think it’s a good thing to have a threshold,” says Raoul, who accuses Hofeld of relying on campaign staffers from outside the district to gather his signatures instead of meeting voters himself. “Running for office is more than putting your name on a poster or writing letters to the editor misstating my position.”
Over the weekend of November 22, a couple of Hofeld’s supporters—including his brother Bryan, who’s also an attorney—retraced their steps. “We went back to voters, told them what would happen, and asked them to sign affidavits swearing that they were the voters who signed the nominating petitions,” says Bryan Hofeld.
All in all, it was quite a feat for Kasper, who kept Mell on the ballot by arguing a technicality and knocked Hofeld off the ballot by demanding the judge adhere to the letter of the law. Next time we could save people a lot of time and trouble by simply letting Kasper decide who gets on the ballot, since it pretty much works that way anyway.
