Petition Tips

With people filing for school, park, village, library, village, community college posts today, this is probably too late for most.

Nevertheless, because of the challenge of Crystal Lake Council candidate Robert S. Miller’s petitions (filed earlier), the tips below might help some clandidates:

Petition Tips

Filing for all villages, school boards, park districts, fire protection districts, library districts, etc., starts next Monday and continues for a week.

The lessons candidates should learn from this are

  1. File with the County Clerk a Statement of Economic Interest (known by politicians as the “None, None, None” form). Staple the receipt you receive to your petition package.
  2. Make sure you number the pages of your petition.
  3. Make sure you get twice as many petition signatures as you need.  (While Crystal Lake Council candidate Jeremy Krick was not thrown off the ballot because two of his sixteen signatures were from people living outside of Crystal Lake, that would have been a good enough reason to do so. Losing those two signatures put him under the required minimum number of fifteen.)
  4. Make sure you sign the bottom of your petitions or have your supporters sign the bottom of their petitions in front of a notary public and that those notarizing the signatures both sign and affix their stamps to the form’s bottom.
  5. Staple all of your paperwork together. Do not use a paper clip.
  6. The Loyalty Oath is not required. The law that provided for it has been held unconstitutional.

Comments

Petition Tips — 2 Comments

  1. You also have to file a signed Statement of Candidacy which should also be stapled to the package filed. Be sure to correctly state the office for which you are seeking election and make sure that comports with how that office is described on the petition sheets.

    The circulator is the person who needs to sign the bottom of the petition sheets. The candidate only signs those if he/she was also the circulator. Tina Thornrose was indicted on felony charges for signing petition sheets that were passed by a volunteer.

    If there is more than one signature page all of them have to be NUMBERED. Candidates have been thrown off the ballot for not numbering petition sheets which consisted of only 2 pages.

    The Statement of Economic Interests is filed with the County Clerk but the petitions, which include the receipt for filing of the Statement of Economic Interests, is filed with the Clerk of the entity for which election is sought ie city, school board, park district, library board).

    A commentator on one of the other posts here complained about CL officials trying to keep people off of the ballot through objections. One additional candidate was knocked off for not stapling the petition pages together and not numbering.

    Have an attorney knowledgeable in election law review everything before you submit it.

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