WHY I WITHDREW FROM THE
STATE SENATE RACE

All:

It is with disappointment that I inform you that, on December 7, 2009, I officially withdrew as a candidate for the State Senate in the 13th District. In a politics-as-usual tactic, state senator Kwame Raoul (D-13) paid people to challenge over 2,200 of the 2,748 signatures on our nominating petitions. Last week, he refused to withdraw the challenge in response to my and others’ requests. His move ultimately succeeded in disenfranchising over a thousand registered voters in his own District, including many readers of the Herald and Outlook who signed our petitions. Only 1,000 valid signatures were required to get on the ballot for this office.

As you know, every registered voter residing in the District has the right to sign a petition for candidates. Raoul’s challenge was intended to systematically deprive people of this basic, democratic right by invalidating their signatures on very technical grounds – such as the claim that the signature was not genuine. He preferred to win this way rather than by facing me and you, the voters, in a free and fair election over the urgent issues of joblessness, health care, foreclosures and ethics reform.

The incumbent understood better than I the deeply flawed Board of Elections (“Board”) system, which he fully exploited to his advantage. To respond to the challenge that many of your signatures were not genuine, my volunteers and I spent 6 days, including Thanksgiving Day, crisscrossing the south side and obtaining 186 affidavits from petition signers. However, as it turned out, in most cases the hearing officer at the Board gave little or no weight to the affidavits. The board also mostly disregarded live testimony from our circulators and from those who obtained the affidavits, even where these individuals testified that they personally knew the signer. In 10 years as a lawyer, I have not seen a worse, more legalistic system: it is not evidence of the voter’s intent to sign the petition that counts; rather, the standard of genuineness that trumps all other evidence is solely whether the signature on the petition and/or the affidavit is identical to the original registration signature in the Board’s records, no matter how old. We all know that people’s signatures change over time and that they vary with the physical circumstances under which people sign. These facts are simply not acknowledged by the Board, which, in practice, applies a presumption that your signature on a petition is not genuine. The only way to overcome the presumption is through live testimony from each voter whose signature is challenged, but challengers like Raoul know this is logistically impossible under the extremely abbreviated timetable for these proceedings.

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