How difficult is it for someone to follow simple guidelines or rules, especially if that someone wants to vote on guidelines or rules for others to follow. Naperville has three ‘someones’ who need to explain why they apparently don’t need to follow simple rules.
This Monday at 9 a.m. two candidates (Derek McDaniel and Nag Jaiswal) running for election to the Naperville city council, along with mayoral candidate Tiffany Stephens, will seek approval from the Naperville Electoral Board to continue their quest to run for election in spite of challenges filed regarding their nominating petitions.
The Board consists of Naperville Mayor Steve Chirico, councilman Paul Hinterlong, and City Clerk Pam Gallahue. Board members have no horse in the race; Chirico is not seeking re-election for a third term, Hinterlong has termed-out, and the city clerk is not an elected position.
Tiffany Stephens candidacy is being challenged because she has suppossedly not resided in Naperville for at least one year as required by Illinois municipal code. McDaniel’s petitions are being challenged because the sheets were not properly numbered consecutively or secured as required by Illinois election code, and Jaiswal’s petitions were not “uniform or consistent” per state election code. Some petition pages apparently listed the office as ‘City Council’, or ‘Naperville City’ rather than ‘Naperville City Council’.
Other “infractions” for some of the three included, improper dates, different ink-colored heading fields, the county or city field was missing or incorrect.
Granted, some of the errors or breaches, were minor in nature (other than the question of residency), however attention to detail is a huge requirement for anyone seeking election. Elected officials require “common folk” to abide by rules they create, hence the good folks of Naperville should expect no less from those seeking and being elected to office.
Material defects should lead someone to getting kicked off the ballot. But kicking someone off over the wrong fastener? Page numbers in wrong spot?
The same lawyer that filed the Naperville objections just filed one against a candidate in Aurora. All on behalf of Democratic Party leaders. He’s a high profile lawyer that also filed objections in the Chicago mayor race.
So now our local and purportedly nonpartisan elections will play the same games they play in Chicago…ie if you are not part of the “machine” list of choices they will tie your filing in court knowing full well that most local campaigns will not have the means to litigate the issue in court.
This has never been done in Naperville in the past and in my view is a giant backward for local politics. Pretty easy for any candidate with means to allege another has bad signatures. We have opened the door to lesser funded candidates being bullied off the ballot. A pretty sad direction for the City.
Except when has been done. I seem to remember when residents wanted to add a non-binding referendum to the ballot. The electoral board nit picked every one of the above issues, and viola, the people of Naperville never got to see or vote on the issue.
The residence issue is a serious matter and a good reason to keep a candidate off the ballot,if true.
The others are minor clerical issues and basically lame reasons to nullify a candidates petition. These very basic mistakes, however, do indicate a short coming in the campaign staff and officials working with these candidates. If these campaigns lack the basic organizational and execution skills needed to complete the petition process it is hard to imagine they will suddenly develop the degree of organization and execution need to become a serious candidate in the eyes of most voters.
So keeping them on the ballot or taking them off is unlikely to significantly impact how the election evolves. This is more a bureaucratic matter of precedents of how picky future election boards will have to be in evaluating candidate petitions in the future. Up until now it has been pretty lacks without creating any problems.
As long as we can keep perpetual candidate Jim Haselhorst off the ballot, I’m fine with it.
If a politician can’t even process important documents correctly then they shouldn’t be on city council. Good riddance