Chicago Republicans

On Friday January 13, 2012, an Objection was filed against the Nomination Papers of Barack Obama to appear in the ballot for the Illinois Primary on March 20, 2011.    The three Objectors are Sharon Meroni, Chris Cleveland and myself.  I wrote the Objection, and will be acting as legal counsel in the Objection proceeding. After considerable effort to analyze the 5,000 signatures submitted by the President, we concluded that he is well short of the 3,000 valid signatures required to be on the primary ballot.

If we are successful, Barack Obama's anme will not appear on the Democratic Primary Ballot in the March 20, 2012 Democratic Primary in Illinois.   For those who will falsely brand this a "birther" challenge, it simply is not.  This is based on the President's filed petitions, not his birthplace or geneology.  

The Objection arose out of a series of ballot integrity and election fraud investigations and filings that Sharon Meroni and I have conducted for the past year and a half, both independently and through our new organization, Defend The Vote.  www.defendthevote.com.    Sharon had read the reports from Indiana which included claims that fraudulent nominating petitions were filed for President Obama in 2008.   It brought up the question of whether other Petitions filed in Illinois were suspect.  

(We are still quite busy at Defend The Vote, and plenty is in the pipeline on the Illinois ballot integrity front, but more on that later.)  

We had other concerns.  One major one is the byzantine aspects of the Illinois ballot access system. in which challenging nominating petitions is a legendary blood sport in Chicago and Cook County.  I have been representing Republican candidates for free before the various boards since about 2004,  fighting to keep them on the ballot against Democratic (and sometimes local Republican) challenges seeking to knock them off the general election ballot, to allow the Democrats to run unopposed.  President Obama himself used this process to knock four opponents off the ballot to allow him to run unopposed for his first term as State Senator in Illinois.  So he certainly has no right to complain about this Objection.  We wanted to see what the Illinois State Board of Elections would do with this, since my previous efforts to get the Board to do its job in politically uncomfortable circumstances have starkly failed.  

A third objective was to show the Democratic powers in Chicago (and therefore in Illinois) that after years of taking shots, Republican elements in Chicago had now achieved the hard-won ability to strike back hard on the challenge front, even on petitions involving thousands of signatures.   We want to see if the Machine and its Republican minions want to keep playing this game, or will stop messing with the GOP, as the price has now gone up sharply.

The legal fees will be paid by Jack Roeser, to whom we offer our thanks.

The first hearing is on January 24, and I expect a frigid welcome from the Board and its Democratic Chairman.   (That won’t,  however, be anything new for me at the State Board of Elections, where I am considered a Republican “troublemaker, ” or with this Chairman, with whom I have had near shouting matches overpast cases at the Board on Republican cases, most notably the 2006 full Board hearing on the case by the Cook County GOP against Democratic Alderman using City rented Aldermanic offices as Democratic Party campaign centers.  That hearing was a two hour rodeo, as witnesses can attest.)   

We shall see what course this takes, and I will be both dressed warmly and unafraid.  We will keep you updated on this site, so check in on the evening to the  24th  for an update.