A broad base of dissatisfaction with Chicago`s election apparatus exists among groups who agree that the system must be changed but can`t get together on how.
Until some middle ground is discovered, the prospect for legislative reform of the Chicago election process seems dim.
The appointment and training of better election judges are the keys to cleaning up Chicago elections, according to an independent election watchdog group as well as the regular Democratic and Republican Parties and the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners.
The stumbling block now and in the past is that these groups, as well as supporters of Mayor Harold Washington, strongly differ over how the judges should be selected and controlled, interviews with The Tribune show.
Neither regular Democrats nor Republicans nor Mayor Washington`s supporters can separately command a majority in the legislature. And even if Chicago`s regular Democrats and Republicans could form an alliance, Downstate legislators are known to oppose some of the reform proposals, viewing them as unnecessary.
By state law, nearly 15,000 election judges are needed for Chicago elections, 5 in each of the city`s 2,900 precincts. The judges are supposed to be evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans and are to be selected, or at least approved, by the parties they represent.
For decades the Republican Party in Chicago has had difficulty filling its quota of 7,500 judges, and in recent years, the erstwhile Democratic machine has also come up very short.
Matthew Flamm, president of Project LEAP (Legal Elections in All Precincts), an independent group that recruits election judges, said that in recent elections the political parties have failed to supply between 1,000 to 3,000 judges, depending on the election.
”When I was at LEAP, it was the Republican Party that had broken down. Now the Democratic Party has broken down, too,” said Kirsten Svare, who was executive director of LEAP for 10 years until joining the Washington administration in 1983.
The results of the breakdowns have been:
— Polling places that fail to open because the judges have not arrived.
— Haphazard selection of judges in the polling places on election day.
— A crescendo of complaints about election irregularities, including much of the kind, elections officials and a citizens group separately concluded, that combined with outright fraud to account for as many as 100,000 miscast votes in the Feb. 24 mayoral primary.
And these problems helped cause in a mix-up in the primary when an estimated 2,000 voters who wanted to vote in the Democratic primary were instead given ballots for the Solidarity Party.
Mayoral supporters say the number may be much higher.
Washington and his supporters have blamed Michael Lavelle, chairman of the election board, for the confusion and have once again called for his removal.
Lavelle has countered that in many of the precincts where the wrong ballots were handed out, the judges were supporters of the mayor who failed to read their election instructions or even the labels on the ballots. And a canvass of election results by the board showed that ballots cast improperly was a citywide phenomenon.
To Flamm of LEAP one solution to this worsening problem is to change the law to allow the appointment of 6,000 nonpartisan election judges, 2 in each precinct, leaving the Democrats and Republicans the responsibility for appointing only 4,500 each.
Flamm said many qualified people decline to cooperate with either party organization, but would serve as judges if they could be nonpartisan.
Another proposal made recently is that major Chicago corporations give some employees election day off with pay if these employees use the day to serve as election judges.
Paul Green, director of the institute for public policy at Governors State University, suggested to The Tribune that every new lawyer in Chicago should be required to serve as a judge in two elections before he or she is admitted to the bar.
Flamm argued that the Chicago election board can legally, and without political party approval, start to appoint judges to fill vacancies up to 28 days before the election. Such a head start would allow judges who have regular jobs to arrange for a day off, said Flamm, and allow the board sufficient time to fill all vacancies and train the judges.
This argument set off a round of charges and countercharges that illustrate how election judges are chosen in Chicago and the distrust between the groups involved in elections.
Washington supporters, in their latest call for Lavelle`s removal as head of the election board, cited as one of the grounds ”the chronic failure of the board to recruit and train sufficient numbers of election judges.”
Washington supporters gave as an example the board`s alleged failure to appoint judges supplied by LEAP until only eight days before the primary.
In response, Lavelle cited a federal court ruling from 1972 that gives the Democratic and Republican Parties control over the naming of the election judges ”up to five days before any election.”
This ruling came in a lawsuit filed against the election board by some of the same individuals, currently supporters of the mayor, who now demand that Lavelle operate differently.
Lavelle also displayed letters from Ald. Edward Vrdolyak (10th), head of the Cook County Democratic Party, and Donald Totten, head of the local Republican Party, insisting that no election judges be assigned without political party approval. These letters, which are the legal prerogatives of the two political parties, were dated Feb. 9, only 15 days before the primary. Totten told The Tribune that he insisted on the GOP`s authority to approve Republican election judges because in the past Democrats have signed up as Republican judges. ”I wanted to make sure I saw every Republican application and signed off on it,” Totten said.
Lavelle said the board began to give tentative appointments to LEAP judges 13 days before the election on the assumption that some vacancies would not be filled by the parties, as usual. ”We penciled them (LEAP judges) in,” he said. Lavelle displayed a letter from Project LEAP thanking the board for its ”cooperation and assistance” in the placing of LEAP judges for the primary.
Totten said that he saw a ”lot of merit” in the LEAP proposal to have the board start to appoint judges without party approval 28 days before the primary.
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Lavelle, Flamm and Totten as well as Sen. Philip Rock (D., Oak Park), president of the state Senate, agree that the elections system in Chicago needs to be changed.
”I think the system needs overhaul,” Totten said.
Lavelle, Flamm and Rock favor the appointment of two, year-round, professional election judges in each Chicago precinct. Lavelle contends that professional election judges would be less likely to permit irregularities, such as allowing unregistered voters to vote. He said this was a serious problem in the February primary.
A bill sponsored by then-State Sen. Edward Nedza (D., Chicago) to permit the appointment of professional election judges passed the Senate in 1985 and 1986 but was not passed in the House.
Totten said this proposal ”definitely needs more airing in the legislature.”
Disagreements arise among these individuals, however, over whether the judges should be partisan or nonpartisan.
Lavelle and Flamm prefer the professional judges to be nonpartisan, although Lavelle indicated he might agree to have them aligned with the two parties if necessary to get the bill passed.
Totten said, ”I would oppose the nonpartisan approach.” He`s sure, Totten said, that the Chicago Republican Party could supply 3,000 professional judges, one per precinct.
Nedza`s proposal would have made the professional judges partisan judges, half Republicans and half Democrats. All proponents agree that the cost of paying these judges would be a problem.
Mayor Washington and his supporters oppose any legislative move to allow the appointment of professional judges by the election board, or by the election board and the political parties, while Lavelle is in charge of the board.
Washington has consistently held that Lavelle is a tool of the regular Democratic Party.
Lavelle disagrees.
”If we`re going to be held responsible for them (professional election judges), these should be our employees, hired according to our standards,”
Lavelle said.
The level of animosity between the Washington administration and Lavelle reached a peak Friday when 35 Washington supporters filed a lawsuit demanding Lavelle`s removal from the election board by the Cook County Circuit Court and asking the court to take over supervision of the board for the April 7 election. The lawsuit said each of the 35 was ”a member of a civic or labor organization, civil rights group or community organization.”
The suit asks that the court remove James Nolan, the Republican commissioner on the three-member election board, for engaging, along with Lavelle, in a ”pattern of malfeasance and nonfeasance.” It alleges that Lavelle and Nolan ”have undermined the integrity of municipal elections in Chicago.”
The first, and perhaps most serious, charge in the lawsuit is that the election board deleted language from the manual for the judges of election in the February primary that stated that green ballots were Democratic ballots and yellow ballots were Republican ballots.
The suit said the deletion of this language caused the mix-up in which Democratic voters were given Solidarity Party ballots.
The suit said Lavelle and Nolan were responsible.
The suit also said the election board ”packed the Illinois Solidarity ballots separately from the other primary ballots, thus causing election judges to believe that such Illinois Solidarity ballots were the only ballots available to them.”
Lavelle said the election board deleted the language describing the ballot colors because the board did not know at the deadline for printing the manuals what color the Solidarity ballots would be. The manufacturer of the ballots had proposed ”buff” colored ballots. The board felt this color was too similar to the white ballots used by voters who wished to vote solely in the nonpartisan, aldermanic election, he said. The board sought a color with better contrast, but finally settled for putting a stripe on the Solidarity ballots, Lavelle said.
Asked why the board did not print a one-page insert to the manual once the ballot colors were known, Lavelle contended that an insert was
unnecessary. ”The ballots are clearly labeled” with the names of the parties, he said. ”The colors are only part of it.”
Lavelle also said the Democratic, Republican, nonpartisan and Solidarity ballots could not all fit in the ”transfer case.”
As a result, the board packed the Solidarity ballots in the ”equipment supply carriers on the top shelf so the judges couldn`t miss them.” The board packed the Democratic, Republican and nonpartisan ballots in the transfer cases–which Lavelle called ”the standard place for the ballots.”
He said the judges who handed out the wrong ballots did not read the manual.
A page of the manual is headed, ”Election Morning Duties, 5:15 a.m. to 6:00 a.m.”
Step 3 on that page says, ”Open transfer case and count ballot cards.”
Nolan charged the lawsuit against him and Lavelle was filed for ”purely political purposes. ”I think it`s frivilous and ridiculous,” Nolan said.