Petition tyranny

“We throw ‘em up to the ceiling and the good one’s stick,” deadpanned Sidney Holzman, Chair of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, Chicago’s election czar during the 1950s, when asked how candidate petitions submitted to his office were reviewed.

His quip was not that far from the truth – and that continued to be the case for many years after.

Candidates had to file nominating petitions in accordance with state law, and the Election Board was ruthless in its determination of the validity of signatures. As an administrative weapon of the politicians who held sway at City Hall, its action was critical in denying a place on the ballot to candidates not wanted by the powers-that-be. 

Voters could legally sign nominating petitions for only one candidate for a specific office, not for all contenders. But most voters didn’t know that (only loyal Machine voters were told) so many signed multiple ones just to “help them get on the ballot.” They didn’t know that their signatures would later be disqualified.     

And technicalities abounded. At one time, voter signatures would not be accepted unless street names were followed by the full words “Street,” “Avenue,” “Boulevard,” “Road,” “Place,” or whatever. “Broadway” was a tricky one. It didn’t have anything following it, so if a voter scribbled something additional, the signature was disallowed.

Directional abbreviations were not considered valid, either. It was determined that “N.”, “S.”, “W.”, and “E.” could mean different things. Voters had to spell out the entire word. 

Names, of course, had to exactly match the way the voter was registered. If a voter was registered with a full middle name, writing only an initial was not acceptable.  

Each page had to be signed by the ONE person who had witnessed all the signatures. And a notary public needed to attest to the validity of that signature. A petition could not be passed around a room on a clipboard or left on a table for people to sign unless the same person accompanied it the entire time.

The pages had to be numbered correctly and consecutively and bound together. They could not be loose. One mistake could invalidate the entire submission.

And other documents were often required to accompany the petition – a statement of candidacy, a statement of economic interest, and an anti-Communist loyalty oath.

Even after the oath was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, it was still required by the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners. A candidate could not be denied a place on the ballot for refusing to file it, but would have to sue the city, thus receiving a lot of unwanted publicity over an irrelevant, and politically damaging, issue.