-By Warner Todd Huston
The petition challenge is a long-time, widely abused, wholly cynical method of destroying your opponent here in Illinois. The petition challenge has been known to eliminate candidates from ballots all across the state — but most often in the tough town of Chicago — preventing voters from having their choice on election day. In fact, a petition challenge is how Barack Obama beat his first major political opponent in Chicago.
Back in 1996 young candidate Barack Hussein Obama challenged the petition of long-time Chicago pol Alice Palmer and had her knocked off the ballot leaving Obama as the only one left for the voters to chose from come election day. The worst part of Obama’s cynical effort to ditch his opponent is that Alice Palmer was widely accepted as his political mentor at the time. With the disrespect Obama is now showing America’s allies we should find this as no surprise considering how he treated his own political mentor and friend back in ‘96.
There are legitimate reasons for a petition challenge, of course. Fake petition signatures, false filings, etc., these things should be challenged, certainly. We don’t want candidates to reach the ballot through fraud to be sure. But silly challenges abound in this state and it is nothing but a cynical gaming of the system.
In the Streamwood/Elgin area (western most Cook County) we find one of those illegitimate, cynical petition challenges. Illinois Review notes the challenge made by Democrats over the petition of Steve Rauschenberger of Elgin. The charge? Democrats say that Rauschenberger is not an “official” Republican so his petition filing is illegal because it calls him a Republican.
So what about Rauschenberger’s GOP bonafides?
For those of you who don’t know, Rauschenberger served for 15 years as Republican state senator in Springfield where he was chairman of the Senate Appropriation Committee (1994-2002) and assistant Republican Leader (2002-2006). In 2004 he ran statewide in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate, and in 2006 he ran in the Republican primary for Governor and the Lt. Governor. And since 2006 he’s served as President of the United Republican Fund.
And what about this quixotic Democrat challenge? With that history how can Rauschenberger not be an “official” Republican? Well, it seems that for the 2008 election Steve Rauschenberger pulled a Democrat ballot so that he could vote for his sister for Elgin Township Trustee (there was no GOP primary there). So what, you ask? Well, the Democrats are trying to stretch a DuPage County court ruling used to bump a candidate off the ballot that would have faced Senator Carol Pankau. Democrats are hoping it will do the same to Rauschenberger.
Illinois is really the only state in the union that has this farcical petition challenge process. Only two other states even allow petition challenges in the primary contest — New York and Pennsylvania. But in those two states a non-partisan board is set up to review challenges and rarely is it part of the political process. Some states don’t even require petitions for candidates to get on a primary ballot in the first place.
In any case, it is just one more example of the silly games that Illinois politicians play. Unfortunately, it cheapens the process and leads citizens to distrust the whole system.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, TheRealityCheck.org, RedState.com, Human Events Magazine, AmericanDailyReview.com, and the New Media Journal, among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events and is currently the co-host of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Conservatism” heard on BlogTalkRadio. Warner is also the editor of the Cook County Page for RedCounty.com.
He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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