Significantly increased interest in rooting out abusive judges is one outcome of the campaigns led by Black Lives Matter activists against police violence and for criminal justice reform. Voters can now monitor judges through the online bar association ratings and campaigns by progressive organizations.
Voting may seem less urgent if you’re in a blue city and blue state. But there are some choices that matter a lot, even in Chicago, where voters can feel perilously relaxed about the prospects for Democrats. Let’s look at four — governor, attorney general, judges, and Metropolitan Water Reclamation District. Read further to see why the stakes are high, an explanation of the importance of the attorney general, how to identify and vote against some of the most abusive judges, and why the obscure Metropolitan Water Reclamation District needs our close attention. For endorsements by progressive organizations, consult Reclaim Chicago, United Working Families, Our Revolution Illinois • Chicago, Chicago Teachers Union, SEIU Illinois State Council, National Nurses United, Planned Parenthood, Naral Pro-Choice America.
My earlier guide, “Illinois Primary: How do you know who the progressives are?” may still interest you for its overview, its background on Chicago political issues, and its descriptions of individual candidates, many of whom won the primaries.
Some voting tools.
Find your polling place and fill out a sample ballot here (Chicago only); or here (Illinois, doesn’t include county, municipal, or party races)
Sample ballots: Chicago; Cook County; Illinois (or Ballotpedia). Chicago includes Illinois Democratic State Central Committee, but some of the others don’t).
Find your election district here for every office, from Congress to Illinois Democratic State Central Committee. You can also do a web search and find other tools like this one, most useful for Chicago residents — Chicago’s Board of Election site gives you your polling/registration place, verifies your voter registration, gives you a sample ballot, contact info for public officials, and allows you to check status of a vote-by-mail application.
Voting for Governor
Ballotpedia
You don’t want to vote for a billionaire, so you’ll sit this Illinois election out? Here’s the scariest argument I’ve seen for voting for Pritzker: If Rauner wins, we could be faced with a Republican-gerrymandered Illinois after the 2021 redistricting. Read how in Ben Joravsky’s Reader column: “Warning, Democrats: A Rauner victory over Pritzker could turn Illinois into a red state.” If you think the chances are slim, read it — and weigh those odds against the huge stakes.
But also refresh your memory on how Rauner tried to put the Scott Walker-Wisconsin, Mike Pence-Indiana agenda over on the legislature by refusing to pass a budget for three years unless the legislature caved. Eliminating environmental protections, crushing unions, starving schools and health care —the agneda has long been Republican orthodoxy, only the tactics are new. Rauner’s tactic was to refuse to submit or approve a budget, which would stop spending on healthcare, education, social supports, to blackmail Democrats into agreeing to his union busting and pro-business agenda. You can see the devastation he was willing to bring us in the accompanying illustration. If we have a budget now, it is because enough Republicans crossed over to vote with Democrats, overriding Rauner’s veto to save themselves in the upcoming election.
From “An Illustrated Guide to the Illinois State Budget Crisis.” Sophie Lucido Johnson in F Newsmagazine, April 10, 2016.
This is one of those eyes-wide-open votes. Both Pritzker and Rauner have offshored millions, and Pritzker is an establishment Democrat who has moved to the left to follow the voting base. His platform is quite progressive, most notably his plans to allow Illinois residents to buy into Medicaid, legalize marijuana, implement other major criminal justice reforms, expand early childhood education, and work toward a progressive income tax to reduce growing income inequality.
Note: The progressive income tax, to replace the flat tax that has the wealthy pay the same rate as the middle class, would require an amendment to the Illinois Constitution. That might be possible with Democratic control of both houses of the legislature and the governor’s office, but it would also require considerable pressure from the Democratic base. In the meantime, some workarounds would be possible, such as a popular millionaire’s tax surcharge.
Attorney General
Ballotpedia
Democratic state senator Kwame Raoul has lost some of his lead to right-wing Republican Erika Harold. What do the polls say? I haven’t seen recent polling, and there hasn’t been much polling for attorney general; an October poll shows Raoul ahead, but with 39% of voters undecided.
Harold is a social conservative. She opposed to abortion even in the case of rape and incest, supported repeal of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), opposed marriage equality and advocated for Social Security “reform” (code word for privatization, increasing the retirement age, ending cost of living increases — and telling your kids to start saving their pennies).
Raoul has what has become a standard progressive platform for blue state Democrats. His record as state senator, votes and sponsorship of bills, shows consistent support for gender equality, affordable healthcare including Medicaid expansion, voting rights, criminal justice reform, access to abortion and contraception, sexual assault and domestic violence survivors, labor rights, environmental protections.
The candidates’ policies and values matter because state attorneys general prosecute violations of law, set the priorities for law enforcement, and can mobilize the state’s resources against corporate or government abuses. So for example, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan joined multi-state law suits to block Trump’s attacks on the Affordable Care Act and attempt to defund “sanctuary states” and separate immigrant families. Madigan also intervened to force Mayor Rahm Emanuel to agree to a court-supervised consent decree to reform the Chicago Police Department. Which attorney general candidate would you trust to monitor the payout of the Master Tobacco Settlement, which brings Illinois a $9.1 billion through 2025 — someone who believes in using government to punish corporate fraud, or a Republican who is pro-business and anti-regulation?
How to vote for judges
Will the judges you vote for respect the women who come before them? Honoré Daumier, Woman Pleading for Justice, date unknown. Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.
Some of the judges seeking retention are known abusers in the courtroom, some have shown prejudice against minorities, some are known for their pro-police bias or for their excessive sentences. Seven judges in Cook County received negative reviews from the bar associations. Matthew Coghlan was even opposed for retention by the Cook County Democratic Party, with County Board President Tony Preckwinkle making robocalls asking us to vote “No.”
You can download a pdf with a summary of the results at voteforjudges.org.
You might also look at Injustice Watch, which gives you a downloadable PDF listing of judges and their ratings, flagging the judges with negative ratings, past “controversies,” notable reversals, lenient or harsh sentencers, and which ones are former prosecutors and former public defenders. There are 11 organizations of lawyers with ratings in the Injustice Watch chart. You can see which judges are flagged by the Women’s Bar Association of Illinois, the Black Women’s Lawyer Association of Greater Chicago, the Cook County Bar Association (black lawyers and judges), the Puerto Rican Bar Association of Illinois, the Lesbian and Gay Bar Association of Chicago. The Chicago Council of Lawyers was formed as a “counter bar association,” an alternative to the Chicago Bar Association formed by young activist lawyers when the 1968 social movements and state repression divided the legal profession.
Injustice Watch notes these particular cases:
One, Matthew Coghlan, is being sued by two exonerees who contend that, as a prosecutor, he worked with a now-disgraced detective to frame them for murder. A second judge, Maura Slattery Boyle, has been reversed by the appellate courts far more often the past six years than any other judge. Michael Clancy, in bond court, has repeatedly held suspects on bail higher than they could afford, contrary to a new local court rule enacted by Chief Judge Evans last year. A fourth judge, Michael McHale, was accused by defense attorneys of holding improper private conversations with prosecutors about a pending case. [My bold.]
A group of progressive lawyers and activists formed a Coalition to Dump Matt Coghlan. Injustice Watch has more on Coghlan here.
[I’m adding a late note at the end of this article about why I’m discounting the Tribune’s recommendation of a “no” vote against Lisa Ann Marino, praised in the report by the Chicago Council of Lawyers.]
The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District
“Vote for me! I’ll take care of Lake Michigan for you!” George Cruikshank, “Salus populi, suprema lex,” 1832. Neptune sits on the London version of the MWRD, with a chamber pot on his head, dead animals on his trident and polluted drinking water in his goblet. British Museum, (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
This body isn’t well-known but needs to be. It is responsible for treating the city’s sewage and keeping our streets and houses from flooding during heavy rainfalls. This means, also, keeping raw sewage out of Lake Michigan and the Chicago River … which they are unable to do. It has a budget of $1.2 billion and has 2000 full-time employees, so naturally it is scandal-ridden for corruption and mismanagement, just the center for environmental vision the Democratic establishment can provide. The board members get sometimes huge donations from companies doing business with the board and there is a history of scandal. There’s some background in the website of the Better Government Association, which has proposed an independent inspector general for the MWRD. And here also is an excellent article by an independent journalist, Emeline Posner.
Note that two Democratic candidates are incumbents: Debra Shore (12 years) and Kari K Steele. Incumbents bear responsibility for the mismanagement and scandals: the MWRD paid $95,000 to executive director David St. Pierre, when he was forced out after an investigation board members are keeping secret; the Better Government Association in 2015 reported that the MWRD had been leasing land along the Stevenson for bargain prices to tenants who had been sued for environmental violations, including one who didn’t report a 50,000 gallon antifreeze spill; pay-to-play politics was exposed by a Green Party investigation, with $400,000 in campaign donations to commissioners; a board president owned a consulting firm whose job it is to “make life as easy as possible for his dozens of corporate clients, some of them heavy polluters.”
My vote here is not going to be an educated one, because I haven’t found enough information on the candidates. So I will be motivated by my default bias, against establishment politicians. The Tribune and Sun-Times endorse all the Democratic candidates; I am paying attention to the Green Party candidates, whose environmental credentials seem on the whole no worse than the Democratic incumbents’ and whose election would upturn business-as-usual. One of them, Geoffrey Cubbage, was quite impressive in a long interview on the Midwest Socialist podcast, “Sewer Socialism.” Unfortunately for the Greens, his opponent is an unusually qualified Democratic candidate, Cameron Davis. Davis is former president of the Alliance for the Great Lakes; he represented, as a lawyer, the National Wildlife Federation, and he was a senior adviser for the Great Lakes in the US EPA during the Obama administration.
Some of the other Democratic candidates have no background in environmental science, but the editorial boards prefer them for the “government experience” (translation: They’ve been socialized into the system and they’ll behave). So their qualifications are that they are “visionary leaders” and “exemplary managers” and “innovators.” I can vote for lawyers, managers, politicians, or I can vote for socialist environmental activists.
You can find a list of ballot measures for Cook County here.
Good luck to all of us.
—Paul Elitzik
[This note added in response to the Tribune Editorial Board’s recommendation of a “no” vote on Lisa Ann Marino for the Cook County Circuit Court.]
The Chicago Tribune editorial board in today’s endorsement list asks us to vote “no” on Lisa Ann Marino, in addition to Boyle and Coghlin. They explain here. They rely on the Chicago Bar Association (CBA) ratings. Here is the Chicago Council of Lawyers’ (CCL) rating comment:
The CCL found her qualified. The CBA rated her “not recommended,” saying there are “significant concerns about Judge Marino’s work ethic, punctuality, diligence, and knowledge of the law.” In a response to the CBA’s negative rating, Marino mentioned that she was found “qualified” by many other bar associations including the CCL which noted that they believe she is “knowledgeable,” “thorough,” “well prepared,” and has “good county management skills”. The ISBA recommended her for retention.
Past: She was rated as qualified by the CCL, CBA, and ISBA when she ran in 2012.
The CCL in its own report said:
Judge Marino is reported to have good court management skills. She runs an efficient court call and is reported to be respectful and fair to all parties. She is especially praised for her dealings with litigants unrepresented by counsel. She is knowledgeable about her area of law and is described often as being thorough and well prepared. The Council finds her Qualified for retention to the Circuit Court. [My italics]
Odd that the Tribune editorial board singles her out, when there are other judges rated unqualified by CBA that it recommends. In the CC:I like the “praise for her dealings with litigants” and wonder if maybe she is too fair to all parties. My uneducated, inexpert bias is to remember the class bias of the Tribune editorial board, which endorses Rauner and Harold, and to remember their devious support of Trump over Clinton in 2016 (by endorsing Gary Johnson). I’d rather be influenced by the CCL report and lean towards judges who receive praise for “fairness” and for “dealings with litigants unrepresented by counsel” (translation: poor people).
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