Evanston Electoral Board Issues Rulings On Candidate Objections

EVANSTON, IL — During more than seven and a half hours of hearings over three days this week, the Evanston Electoral Board removed two candidates from the ballot ahead of next year's municipal elections but rejected challenges to three others.

Municipal electoral boards in Illinois are, by law, composed of the mayor, city clerk and senior councilmember. They are tasked with hearing objections to candidates' nominating petitions for local elections.

Evanston Mayor Steve Hagerty, City Clerk Devon Reid and 8th Ward Ald. Ann Rainey heard six challenges to five of the 28 candidates who last month filed paperwork to appear on the April 6 ballot.

Two candidates whose petitions were challenged due to a lack of binding — Eric Young in the 3rd Ward and Rebeca Mendoza in the 5th Ward — were allowed to remain on the ballot.

They both testified that Deputy City Clerk Eduardo Gomez, who reports to the city manager's office, indicated it would be acceptable for them to submit their petition sheets without first binding them when they turned them on in Nov. 23. Gomez testified he did not believe he was offering any legal advice. Courts have found petition sheets that are not securely fastened can be invalidated.

Mendoza said she was in the process of looking for a stapler to bind together her signature sheets when Gomez told her he could accept unbound petitions. She said she regretted trusting him.

"It's unfortunate that I will carry that sentiment the next time I step into the clerk's office and definitely be more mindful and careful of what I rely on," Mendoza said.

Young's attorney, Daniel Dale, argued the manila envelope in which Young delivered his petitions was sufficient.

"I do believe the deputy clerk misled this applicant," Rainey said, of the challenge to Young's petitions. "I cannot understand any applicant coming with unsecured petitions. That's common sense that you would secure your petitions. But I do believe that at the point where the deputy clerk said, 'No, that's OK you can submit them like that, I have to copy these,' I do believe that the candidate was given permission not to then secure those petitions."

One candidate dropped out of the race during the hearing.

Jane Grover, former 7th Ward alderman who resigned midway through her second term, voluntarily withdrew her candidacy after facing an objection to the validity of the signatures she had collected from Alison Harned.

"After consultation with new election counsel who has reviewed the pleadings in this matter and applicable law, it is with sincere regret that I withdraw my motion to dismiss," Grover said. "Whatever the Electoral Board's decision here would have been I do not think I would prevail on appeal."

Ironically, at Evanston's last electoral board meeting, an objection filed by Grover kept Harned's Evanston Voter Initiative referendum off the ballot in March's primary election.

The board accepted Grover's withdrawal and ordered her name removed from the ballot. Stephanie Mendoza is now the sole city clerk candidate set to appear on the ballot.

Unless a write-in candidate's campaign manages to secure more votes, she is set to succeed Reid, who is challenging Rainey for a seat on City Council.

Rainey and Reid both were recused from the decision on whether to allow 8th Ward resident Shelley Carrillo to join them and Matthew Mitchell on the ballot.

So Ald. Melissa Wynne, 3rd Ward, whose husband led an abortive effort to erase the name of her opponent from the ballot at the hearing, joined Hagerty to provide the board a quorum of two.

In her nominating petitions, Carrillo had listed the office she was seeking as "alderman" without specifying a ward. Her petitions also included residents from outside the 8th Ward. She unsuccessfully sought to dismiss the objection on the grounds that her objector used a nickname, and that she had not been properly served with the objection.

Wynne and Hagerty agreed that Carrillo's petitions needed to note which office she was running for.

"Although there are nine alderman in Evanston, alderman alone is not on the ballot. Residents vote for a particular alderman," Wynne said. "That's something that I've given a great deal of thought to — in terms of, 'What is the office?'"

When he ran for office four years ago, Hagerty said, putting just "mayor" on his petitions would have been insufficient. He said he appreciated Carrillo's efforts but worried about the ambiguity of her petitions and possible voter confusion.

"It really hurts," Hagerty said. "Because I know Evanston and I know we pride ourselves of ballot access and wanting to have as many residents wanting to run for office. But I do think, in this case, that this was a substantial error."

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On Friday, the final challenge was resolved when objector Yvi Russell dropped a challenge to the campaign of incumbent 7th Ward Ald. Eleanor Revelle, who was appointed to replace Grover and ran unopposed four years ago.

Russell's attorney, Andrew Finko, said that while it appeared that Revelle's petitions were not properly bound together with her statement of candidacy, the Electoral Board had made it clear from its earlier rulings that was not enough to remove someone from the ballot.

Mike Kreloff, Revelle's attorney, said even the motion to withdraw was a political attack on his client, who is facing a challenge from Mary Rosinski.

"We have taken the petition in all of our memoranda that what Ms. Revelle did was entirely proper — admittedly not the way these petition filings are often filed, where everything is attached together," said Kreloff, a longtime Democratic Party operative. "But she did file adequately under the law, and that under the law there was substantial compliance and no violation."

Evanston is due to have a Feb. 25 primary election with at least one office on the ballot. Mayoral candidates Daniel Biss, Lori Keenan and Sebastian Nalls will square off, with the top two vote-getters advancing to a runoff on April 6, unless one candidate can manage to secure more than 50 percent of the vote and secure and outright win. The city's mayoral primary process was established in a 1992 referendum.

For other offices, state law on nonpartisan municipal elections applies. That means it takes five candidates to trigger a primary. According to the Illinois State Board of Elections calendar, the deadline for submitting statements of write-in candidacy to force a primary is Dec. 17.