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Four final candidates for Chicago school board — including two incumbents — survived challenges to their signature petitions and were cleared to get on the November ballot at a Tuesday meeting of the city’s Board of Elections.
The board commissioners rejected efforts to block the candidacies of board members Karen Zaccor and Michilla Blaise and would-be members Claudia Peralta and Connie Anderson. Candidate Kernetha Jones was kicked off the ballot.
With those decisions, the ballot for November’s historic Chicago school board races is close to set, though appeals of decisions clearing six candidates are pending in Cook County Circuit Court.
For the first time, Chicago residents will elect all 21 members of the board, after decades of mayoral appointments and a transition stretch in which the board was partly elected and partly appointed by Mayor Brandon Johnson. In three of the races, incumbent board members will be the only options on the ballot, though in at least one case a challenger has vowed to mount a write-in campaign.
The circuit court is slated to rule on a number of dual circulation petition challenges in which challengers argued the petitions should be thrown out because the candidates in the nonpartisan board races enlisted petition circulators who had also collected signatures for partisan candidates in Illinois’ March primary.
The Board of Elections commissioners roundly rejected the argument that those petitions should be invalidated earlier this year. Adam Lasker, general counsel for the board, said Tuesday he expected more appeals could follow the meeting. The board’s work on school board petition challenges is now done. `
Signature challenges to remove candidates from the city’s ballot are a longstanding fixture of Chicago’s rough-and-tumble electoral politics. Of the 51 would-be board members who filed petitions to run in November, 28 faced objections alleging issues with the signatures they collected or other problems. Most survived the bids to kick them off the ballot.
With the ballot now largely finalized, campaigning for the volunteer seats overseeing Chicago Public Schools can begin in earnest — and the races are shaping up to be costly and competitive. Candidates had already raised almost $2 million by the most recent quarterly deadline for reporting campaign fundraising to the state. Some likely heavy spenders, such as the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, have largely held off on spending until the ballot is set and the start of the school year draws more attention to school issues from parents and other voters.
Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.
