Greens Proove Objections are Baseless

Article in the Southern by Nicole Sack on July 14, 2006.

Greens Proove Objections are Baseless
by Nicole Sack
The Southern
July 14, 2006

CARBONDALE - For weeks, the Green Party have been calling the objections raised by state Democrats to keep gubernatorial candidate Rich Whitney and the rest of the Green state wide ticket off the November ballot "frivolous."

Seems the Greens might be on to something.

From preliminary investigations into the petition challenge, the Greens have found some interesting folks who the Democrats say are ineligible to sign Whitney's petition - such as Southern Illinois University Chancellor Walter Wendler and Carbondale City Councilman Joel Fritzler, who are alleged to have invalid addresses.

The addresses of Whitney's own campaign manager Jennifer Rose and Charlie Howe, a candidate for the District 115 state representative seat, are also being challenged by the Democrats.

Turns out they are all legitimate.

"I don't understand it. They need to check their addresses, I guess," Wendler said after being asked to verify his residency. "It's the only place I've lived (for the past five years)."

Even more bizarre, the Democrats claim the signatures of Whitney and his wife, Paula Bradshaw, are not genuine. Whitney, a civil-rights attorney practicing in Carbondale, said he did not think it was possible to forge one's own signature.

"It's pretty incredible," Whitney said. "To be fair (the Democrats) are saying that most of the challenged signatures are not registered to their addresses. But it looks obvious that their objections are baseless."

Whitney, along with the state slate of Greens, filed a motion to dismiss the objections with the State Board of Elections Tuesday, citing the Democrats' challenge as a waste of time and taxpayers' money.

"They will not succeed at keeping us off the ballot because we know that we petitioned very carefully to ensure that everyone signing our petitions averred they were registered to vote in Illinois - and there is simply no way that both the signer and the petitioner were mistaken over 14,000 times," Whitney, 51, said.

The Greens were required to collect 25,000 signatures to get on the statewide ballot, since they are considered a new party in Illinois. The Greens claimed to have surpassed the requirement when they submitted 39,000 signatures to the State Board of Elections in June. The established Republican and Democratic parties were required to collect just 5,000 for the same ballot placement.

Rose - who said she is registered to vote at the address she listed on the petition - said the latest findings just scratch the surface of the Democrats' desperation.

"They've done this in other parts of the state where they have challenged key figures, refuting their signatures, and have said they don't live where they live," Rose said.

David Black, the Green candidate for attorney general, did an analysis of 200 sample signatures collected in the Rockford area last week. According to Black, he said the objections appear to have been done at random. Among those whose signatures were challenged based on allegations they were not registered to vote at the address given were four Unitarian ministers, the publisher of the Rock River Times and two city councilmen from Peoria.

nicole.sack@thesouthern.com

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