Feel free to let me know. This is just stupid. The guy isn’t going to take enough votes in Illinois–and even if he were, fight his ideas because frankly the only one he has going right now is that that he is being persecuted. Take that away and he is a whiny petulant child. Let him rant.
And for those that have time, feel free to help Jeff out on this one–he’s asking for help.
Thank you.
Democrats Against Democracy (DAD). We’ll decide who you can vote for because voters shouldn’t have the right to choose themselves.
I’m obviously with you on this. What are the Democrats afraid of and why are they acting like such chickens? When I told me die-hard liberal Democrat mother about this, she asked “Who’s your candidate for US Senate again?” I feel some bad press coming.
Well, the accusation was that 70% of the signatures Nader supporters collected in Arizona were invalid–that number seems impossibly high, but then again, Nader chose not to contest the judge’s decision to yank him from the ballot.
Of course, Nader can do little harm here in Illinois, but given the shenanigans surrounding his other bids to get on the ballot, checking the signatures doesn’t seem so out of line…
Checking the signatures is what is done before an objection is filed. Randomly picking signatures and saying they aren’t valid because you didn’t have enough time or state workers to make it through all the signatures is out of line. This will all come out in time, but how is it a signature can be said to be forged when the original signature on their voter registration form was never even looked at? And why were so many Democrat state employees stupid enough to fill out the sign-in sheet at the clerks office between June 22 and 28? I don’t know about Arizona shenanigans, but it definitely looks like IL Dems are pulling the same shenanigans that resulted in an indictment of George Ryan, a federal grand jury investigation against Judy Baar Topinka, and a civil lawsuit. The first evidence we had of ethical lapses is that the IL Dem Party is lying about only “assisting” the challenge when everyone knows they are behind the whole challenge. Whose check paid for the two copies of Nader’s petitions?
We’ll have to wait on Jeff’s claims–and it is certainly possible. While I’m a Democrat, I’m not naive enough to think that they’d never use state workers. That said, I just don’t see the point. Even if he got on the ballot it isn’t saving a precedent for the future. Giving the guy attention like this makes him more serious than he is. And really, other than outright fraud, why challenge people to get them off the ballot anyway?
I think there should be some barrier to ballot access, but a low one.
I verified nader petitions for two days, and first of all, all of the people there that i talked to were volunteers from Citizen Action or unpaid interns from offices such as madigan’s. second of all, most of the signatures i checked were invalid because the people signing the petitions weren’t registered voters, so from my experience, 70% does not seem like a high number at all to be rejected in arizona
I don’t know who’s behind it — but I am fairly certain that even if state employees were doing the binder checks, when you check payroll records you’ll find that they were using sick days, vacation days, comp time, etc. Madigan (unlike Daniels) is a stickler for this.
If the Dems are behind this (or encouraging this), I would speculate it has to do with the focus of the coordinated campaign. As long as Nader is on the ticket, the Kerry/Edwards campaign has some reason to look at Illinois every now and then. With Nader out, and the Senate race locked up, Madigan can run the coordinated campaign to suit his purpose (i.e., increase Dem majority in the House).
You can argue the ethics of it, but that might be the motivation.
Also, the 70% invalid number is all that suspicious. It’s high and the end total won’t be 70% invalid. Does anyone know if most of the objections are “not registered” or “not signed in proper person”? Seventy percent “not signed in proper person” is a bit dodgy — not impossible, but unlikely. If most are “not registered,” Nader’s in trouble.
I’ll second the comment on Madigan–he is obsessive about this as I understand–or Steve Brown is at least. I’m not sure Madigan actually talks to them. The larger point being, why spend anytime on Nader? If anything, his voters will help Dems downballot and he isn’t going to swing the state to Bush–if Bush remains on the ballot that is.
Care for a first-person report on the petition for Nader challenge? I was one of the volunteers doing the prep work for the binder check on Saturday, July 10th. I don?t even know how many signatures Nader?s people got, but from what I saw if they gathered even 40% more than the required minimum of 25,000 they should be in pretty good shape. Usually third parties try to gather double the minimum just to survive these challenges.
As to 70% of the signatures in Arizona being invalid, I don?t doubt that many signatures were CHALLENGED, but how many are actually invalid is a whole different thing. The challenged percentage here in Illinois is probably just as high, and in Chicago specifically maybe even higher, and I can tell you that a sizable percentage of those challenges are malarkey.
Each petition sheet has ten signature lines. Every one of the sheets I handled had at least two signatures challenged, and for every petition sheet with two challenges there was a sheet that had eight or nine challenges. Fully fifty percent of the sheets had five or six challenges. It became obvious that you do in fact need to get twice the minimum number of signatures to survive this process. I thought it was odd that I didn?t see any sheets with only one or all ten signatures challenged. I suppose the challengers can?t restrain themselves to just one, and challenging all ten probably raises red flags.
My advice to anyone doing this work in the future is to check those with eight or nine challenges first, in fact prioritize all your sheets from highest number of challenges to lowest. The more challenges on a sheet the easier it was to confirm signatures. Some of the challenging folks apparently just went down the sheet indiscriminately marking challenges that didn?t hold up. The task is to match a signers printed name, address and signature, and the vast majority were challenged as “signer not at address”. A few women who obviously had gotten married were challenged. Mary Jane Public-Smith of a given address would be challenged as “signer not at address” but a quick check of the database would show Mary Jane Public of that address. It was relatively easy to find a lot of people at other addresses and match the signatures to the petition.
The computers at the Cook County Clerks office have the registration roles for Chicago alone. Anyone outside the city can only be found in the state?s computer down in Springfield. All the petitions we were checking were circulated in Chicago so presumably the challengers were using the county clerks database to make their challenges. Yet 10% of the challenges were for addresses outside of Chicago so it was impossible to confirm or deny a signature. Thus they shouldn?t have been challenged in Chicago.
Another 10% of challenges were completely frivolous. Leave out your middle initial (or add it) and your signature will be challenged. Have sloppy printing, you?ll be challenged. Leave the direction of your street off (North, South, etc.), or put down St. when you live on an Ave. and you will be challenged. It?s easy for the patronage army to challenge a signature, it is much more time consuming and tedious work to gather proof that the challenge was unjustified. I encountered three signatures where the information on the petition matched exactly the info in the database but there was no registration card on file, therefore no signature to compare to.
The process is further complicated by software that is completely user UN-friendly. I?ve never taken a computer class but I taught myself a little programming and I?m certain that in the time I took to write this letter I could write a better interface than what they are using at the clerk?s office. It can only be by design that their software is so difficult to use. As I had mentioned most challenges were for as “signer not at address” so right away you search on the given address and all registered voters at that address come up. If your signer doesn?t in fact show up at that address, or if the address is hard to read then you go back and search by name to try to find the signer. When you search on a name you can search for an exact match (John Smith) or a sound alike match (J. Smith). John Smith of course will return several matches and you then get three tries to pick the right guy. If you try the sound alike search you?ll also get every Joe Smith, John Schmitt, John Schmidt, John Sampson and even Tony Stitt, again you get three tries to pick the right guy. This is all further complicated by the fact that there are no shortcut keys used with this software, and even the tab key is more or less useless, you have to use a mouse to move around the form. It?s slow and monotonous, yet in a way rewarding work. Every signature you comfirm is a victory. That?s a voter, a voice, you have just validated.
When I volunteered to help do some of this work I was told it would take as much as three weeks to complete the effort, and I thought that couldn?t be possible. Three weeks to review and confirm 25,000 signatures didn?t seem right. Now I can see that they?ll be fortunate to get it done that fast. Christina Tobin is doing yeoman?s (yeowoman?s as it were) work in overseeing this effort, and should be commended for her commitment to fair and open elections through ballot access. It is for that same commitment that I, a registered Libertarian, volunteered to help Ralph Nader of all people. I long suspected and now know for certain that this process has absolutely nothing to do with fair and open elections.
Gary L. Feezel
Of course Madigan is behind it, there is no doubt he made the decision to challenge Nader and is using IL Dem Party resources to do it. Who paid for the copies of Nader’s petitions? Yes, we have confirmed Democrat state employees (not unpaid interns) are working on Nader’s petition challenge. I didn’t say anything about them being from Madigan’s office, but you figured that out pretty easily. I suppose then that Madigan won’t have any trouble at all releasing those payroll records and sign-in/out sheets from his Chicago office. Oh wait, too many people on staff are “out sick” to work on petition challenges so they don’t have the manpower to look up payroll records and copy sign-in/out sheets. I think we’ll find out very soon if Lisa Madigan is willing and able to do her job.
Gary — veterans of binder checks love those computers! Back in the day, you had to match up signatures by looking at the voter registration cards. That meant the election board had to manually determine the ward and precinct of each signature; then the books with the voter registration cards had to be physically assembled; and then, finally, you got to compare signatures.
Btw, the software used by the County Clerk and City Bd. is pretty standard all around the country. Most people find it pretty user friendly.