Laurel attempts to submit petitions
On December 27, the Illinois State Board of Elections refused to accept nominating petitions for Laurel Lambert Schmidt for Congress for the 3rd district. This is an outrageous denial of democracy. Illinois accepts that political parties can become “established parties” in individual election districts by receiving at least 5% of the vote in the last general election. Laurel ran as a Green Party candidate in that district in 2010 and received over 6% of the vote. Green Party volunteers circulated petitions for Laurel to get her on the 2012 primary ballot and tried to turn them in Dec. 27. However, the ISBE refused to accept these petitions on the grounds that all Congressional Districts have been redrawn and supposedly this wipes out whatever we achieved in 2010. In fact most of what was in the 3rd district is still in the 3rd district.
The ISBE is adopting the least democratic view of the law, denying voters a choice, and benefiting the two corporate parties. The Illinois Green Party and Laurel are suing to get this decision reversed. This issue is now before the Illinois Supreme Court. A big difficulty we are facing in getting an objective ruling on the law is that fact that all judges in Illinois run for office as Democrats or Republicans. They owe their positions to these parties and do not often make decisions favoring democracy over the narrow interests of their corporate party sponsors.
