-By Warner Todd Huston
Doug Ibendahl of Republican News Watch reminds me of something I should have mentioned previously. There is an entire party, one officially recognized by Illinois, that is fighting to get its slate recognized and on the 2010 ballot. The Constitution Party of Illinois was thrown off the ballot but still might have some juice left to reverse that decision.
I hadn’t posted on the struggle that the Constitution Party was going through before because frankly I expected that they wouldn’t end up having enough petition signatures to make the ballot. Turns out they did. Yet the state election board threw them off the ballot anyway and really for no legitimate reason.
The whole petition challenge aspect of Illinois politics is its most venal form of good-old-boyism. Both the GOP and the Dems work hand-in-hand to destroy anyone they don’t want on the ballot. It is disgusting, gutter politics at its worst. Not to mention that it is wholly un-American to deny the voters their choice of candidates.
Now, I am not against the petition policy in and of itself. I think it is a good thing for candidates to have to demonstrate that they have at least some specified thousands of voters who are willing to sign a petition to demonstrate that the candidate really does have backing among the voters. If there were no petition requirements we’d have all kinds of vanity names on the ballot and that would make matters very messy for voters to wade through. It would needlessly complicate things for sure. So I support a petition requirement to weed out the nut jobs, fame seekers, and crazies.
But when a candidate does meet the requirement legitimately, his name should be on the ballot. There should be NO other choice for the election board. They should have NO power to throw people off the ballot that have met the required number of petition signatures. Period.
And Ibendahl makes a great point about money. These constant challenges cost money. Lawyers are hired, time is invested and cases are brought to court and when the major parties are involved in these things that means that money donated to the parties by supporters are going to these obscene challenges and NOT to where the donors wanted it to go — to the actual elections.
Now I don’t care that Democrats are wasting money on these challenges because, well, I want Democrats to be ineffective. But the GOP is needlessly spending this cash, too.
A lot of good but gullible people have been donating to the Illinois Republican Party, assuming their money was going to fight the Democrats. But in reality they’ve been unknowingly funding a hidden scheme to keep conservatives and African Americans off the ballot. It’s mostly about protecting Mark Kirk. Pat Brady and his handlers assume we’re all idiots and will vote for their congenital liar if the only alternative is Alexi Giannoulias.
Exactly and point well taken.
In any case, the Constitution Party takes their case to court on Tuesday. I wish them luck.
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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. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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