News Flash: Illinois Greens fight Dem-backed ballot challenge!

Press Release September 9, 2000

CONTACT: Jake Lewis or Stacy Malkan

(202) 265-4000

BATTLE FOR THE BALLOT IN ILLINOIS A FULL TIME JOB FOR DOZENS OF VOLUNTEERS

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS - Dozens of unpaid Green Party volunteers began putting in 40-hour-plus weeks at the Chicago Board of Elections office last week, going head to head with adversaries who are desperately trying to keep presidential candidate Ralph Nader off the November ballot. Over the next several weeks, Nader supporters must fight line by line to protect nearly 21,000 voters' signatures challenged as illegitimate by the state's Democratic machine.

Reporters are encouraged to visit the proceedings at the Chicago Board of Elections office, located at 69 West Washington on the 6th floor.

The challenge process is occurring at each of 10 computer stations in the Chicago Board of Elections office from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays. Three people are at each station: a Democratic challenger, a Nader supporter and an election judge. For each signature to which a challenge is offered, the Nader supporter must voice an objection. Then, the election official determines whether the challenge should be struck or upheld. If the challenge is struck, that voter's name gets added toward the goal of 25,000 valid signatures, enough to place Nader and running mate Winona LaDuke on the Illinois ballot.

"At taxpayer expense, state board of election employees must go through each of the challenged signatures to determine its validity," said Nader's campaign manager Theresa Amato. "This is a waste of taxpayer money in a blatant, political attempt to squash competition and third-party ballot access."

The Nader supporters contend that a great many of the challenges are without merit. "We've seen challenges because someone wrote 'CHGO' for Chicago, or 'KING DR.' for Martin Luther King Jr. Drive,. said Chicago Green Party member Elizabeth Fraser.

"Signatures on a clipboard are inherently sloppy," Illinois Nader campaign staffer Daniel Johnson-Weinberger said. "People just don't sign quite the same way in their hurry as they do on a voter card - not to mention that  those card signatures can be twenty years old or more! A lot of the election judges are fair, and I think they're making their best effort, but sometimes we disagree."

He pointed out that addresses of high-rise apartments pose special difficulties: "There may be 600 signatures at that address, and we have to look through all those at once to find a quickly scrawled signature that matches. Sometimes we can't do it fast enough. We can eventually rehabilitate that signature with an affidavit, but it's more hassle."

Matching voters' names to addresses using the Chicago Board of Elections' information is also a haphazard process, according to Fraser. "I've heard that they could be at least 90 days behind in recording changes of address," Fraser said.

Printed names rather than signatures also pose a threat in some instances, Fraser said. "One problem is that the petition form as created by the state Board of Elections has no 'signature' heading, only a 'name' heading, but in fact the process requires that signatures match the ones on the voter's registration cards," Fraser said. "Of course our petition collectors had the supporters sign rather than print whenever they caught the problem, but this sometimes went unnoticed until too late."

Nader expects to be on the ballot in 45 states by November. But in Illinois, the state's Democrats have been fighting hard to deny him ballot access, fearing both the strength of his challenge to their party's presidential candidate and the prospect of having Greens to contend with in future elections. Nader supporters say it is no coincidence that Al Gore's national campaign manager, William Daley, is brother to the current Chicago mayor and son to the man who defined Chicago machine politics for a generation.

"It's time for the Democrats to call off the dogs and allow third parties on the ballot," said Amato, who believes the challenges are being led by Democratic political operatives with ties to the Gore campaign. "Instead of debating Nader on the issues and earning their votes, Al Gore and the Democratic machine would rather avoid the political competition and shut Nader out of the process. One word from the Gore campaign and the local machine would stop this undemocratic assault."

The Battle for the Ballot began when an individual backed by the state's Democrats challenged petitions turned in last June 26 in support of the Green Party presidential ticket of Nader and Winona LaDuke. Upon investigation, the state Board of Elections determined that 22,841 signatures had been filed -- less than the 25,000 required for third-party and independent statewide candidates in Illinois. Lawyers for the Nader campaign sought an injunction against the ballot denial, arguing that the state's June deadline was unconstitutionally early. Just last year, the state legislature moved the deadline forward from early August. A federal court judge ruled Aug. 25 that the Greens would be allowed to turn in some 16,000 additional signatures collected through Aug. 7, the deadline prior to last year's law change.

The judge's ruling triggered this next phase of the Democrat-backed challenge to getting Nader on the ballot. Last week, the Democrats revealed they would challenge 21,000 of the 39,000 signatures collected statewide. Since 18,000 were left unchallenged, the Greens must overcome 7,000 challenges in order to reach the 25,000 threshold.

"This is a time-consuming process that is taking our volunteers away from the work of campaigning to sit in an election office and deal with ridiculous objections," Amato said. "But our volunteers have no intention of giving up. They are energized and ready to continue this fight. We fully expect to win this one."