By Ben Joravsky
Politicians have known about this problem since 1990, when Joanne Alter, then a candidate for Cook County clerk, wrote about it in a study. In 1998 Cook County clerk David Orr, an independent Democrat who lives in Rogers Park, finally decided to address the problem by updating the county’s vote-counting technology. He says he had two choices. He could either buy a high-tech optical-scan system, which allows voters to feed special paper ballots into a reader that counts their votes. Or he could buy new technology that works with the current system. Both systems notify voters if they’ve voted for more than one candidate for an office. “If voters accidentally vote for two candidates, the system allows them to vote again,” he says. “That way we cut down on the undercount.”
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Orr decided to go with the second option. “We had a lot of reasons for going that way,” says Michael Kreloff, Orr’s chief legislative aide. “Voters were familiar with it, for one. But also our ballots are so much longer than any counties who have the optical scanner, because of all the judges. The paper listing all the candidates would be unwieldy and long.” Orr then spent $25 million on the equipment, which was tested in a few wards and townships in the March 2000 primary.
“We all knew Pate Philip wasn’t going to bend over backwards to help count Democratic votes in Chicago,” says one Democratic strategist. “Why should he care if Democratic votes are discarded? It’s in his interest to keep the votes down.”
But Philip–who did not return a call for comment–never bent, and the bill died last spring in the senate’s rules committee. “Maybe we made a mistake by not doing it in a feisty manner,” says the strategist. “We played it as insiders–sort of, ‘Come on, guys, let’s do what’s right.’ But you know, the first rule in politics is self-survival.”
The ACLU suit, which was filed January 11, says the current voting system “deprives plaintiffs of their rights to due process and to equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.” The suit seeks an injunction prohibiting any future election “unless all voters are provided error notification of overvotes, undervotes and other ballot irregularities and the opportunity to correct their ballots and to have their intended votes counted.”
The story, reported here last October, began on December 6, 1997, when Caref, a self-avowed communist, took a 16-year-old sophomore to Beloit, Wisconsin, for a Saturday afternoon anti-Ku Klux Klan rally. Caref got permission from the girl’s grandmother, her guardian, to take her. It was, Caref figured, a noble cause–showing a black girl from the south side that there was an integrated front against the Klan. At the rally a scuffle started between anti-Klan protesters and police, and the girl was arrested. Caref accompanied her to the police station, picked her up when she was released, and drove her back home to Chicago. The grandmother, though upset, didn’t hold Caref responsible for the incident, and no one pressed charges.
