Posted: March 16, 2010

By Doug Ibendahl

 

On the evening of March 3rd, the 102 county Republican parties in Illinois held their biannual conventions.

 

The Illinois Republican Party refused to give clear guidance to the GOP County Chairmen regarding how to deal with vacant precincts (those not represented by an elected committeeman), and as a result problems were reported in several locations. Confusion reigned and it was common to see different counties using different standards - often within the same U.S. Congressional District and often in a contested race for State Central Committeeman.

 

But no problem compared to what happened at the Will County Convention.

 

Most of Will County is in the 11th Congressional District, and Will has that district's largest share of voters. In the contested race for the 11th District's State Central Committeeman, challenger Cory Singer took on long time incumbent Bobbie Peterson.

 

The elected Precinct Committeemen of Will County delivered Singer a landslide victory. Singer received around 9,000 weighted votes to Peterson's 4,000. (Reports from the other, smaller counties in the 11th reveal that Singer also won most of those by similar overwhelming margins.)

 

But not so fast said Will County GOP Chairman Dick Kavanagh. Kavanagh unilaterally decided he knew what was best for Will County Republicans. In an incredible display of chutzpah, he single-handedly cast around 13,000 weighted votes from vacant precincts for the incumbent Peterson. Kavanagh even reportedly cast the votes from "absent precincts" - those where a Precinct Committeeman had been elected, but the person didn't attend the convention.

 

Kavanagh's action reversed a landslide win for Singer and threw it back to a landslide win for Peterson.

 

Upon learning their votes were being wiped out, infuriated Republicans at the Will County Convention responded with something close to a reenactment of the actual Boston Tea Party - and understandably so. Two Precinct Committeemen described the scene in their excellent accounts, here and here.

 

The good news is there is a determined group of Precinct Committeemen in Will who are standing up and fighting for what's right. They are refusing to roll over in the face of destructive behavior that threatens to weaken our party. This contest isn't over.

 

The elected Precinct Committeemen have right on their side, and they are going to prevail. Bobbie Jo Peterson should save herself and our party further embarrassment by doing the right thing. She should step aside for Cory Singer.

 

Peterson is only delaying the inevitable. And if Kavanagh wants any hope of saving his County Chairman spot, he should admit he made a mistake, publicly ask for forgiveness, and urge Peterson to do the right thing. That would minimize the damage and clear the air in Will County.

 

Hopefully that will all happen soon. But we'll still have a big systemic problem statewide.

 

The vacant precinct issue was a big problem four years ago too, the last time the State Central Committee was up for election. A principled group of Precinct Committeemen from Lake County ended up suing the State Party and the State Chairman because of problems created by vacant precinct voting in the 10th Congressional District race for State Central Committeeman that year.

 

Everyone was on notice this year. I personally wrote four or five editorials in advance of the conventions warning about what was coming. In the last one, a couple of days prior to the conventions, I said we could be in store for something resembling the situation in Florida in 2000 with Bush vs. Gore. (See here.) The similarity was in the lack of uniform standards across counties. I've taken no joy in seeing those predictions come true.

 

The chaos in Will County could have been easily avoided. Leadership was all that was needed.

 

I left three messages for State Chairman Pat Brady in the week leading up to the conventions. I said I wanted to talk to him regarding my concerns with this vacant precinct issue. He never called me back.

 

One final opportunity to head off the problem was in a conference call with the County Chairmen two days before the conventions. That call was hosted by Randy Pollard, the Chairman of the County Chairmen's Association, and by Pat Brady's executive director from the State Party.

 

The reports I received were that many of the County Chairmen expressed concerns on that phone call about how to deal with the vacant precincts. Most wanted to do the right thing, and most were looking for certainty on the matter. A lot of good people were struggling with what to do.

 

The issue could have been simply resolved on that phone call. A leader would have said, "We're not going to play games this time. We're going to respect the law and our elected committeemen. Our internal rule was wrong. No one should vote their vacant precincts."

 

But that didn't happen. Instead the hosts of the call basically punted. County Chairmen were told to do what they wanted. In other words, it was okay to vote the vacant precincts, but no one had to if they weren't comfortable with the idea.

 

Of course all this did was to further promote distrust between County Chairmen, and good people felt more pressure to do a bad thing, because they assumed others would.

 

I want to say kudos to all of the County Chairmen who held true to principle and refused to vote vacant precincts, often in the face of great pressure. I also want to thank the recent statewide candidates, Adam Andrzejewski, Don Lowery, and Kirk Dillard who stood up and joined the call for a consistent ethical standard - no vacant precinct voting.

 

With SB600 and direct elections, all of this vacant precinct nonsense of course goes away immediately. It's just one of the really awful incentives that real democracy does a nice job of cleansing away.

 

The dirty not so little secret of course is that the incumbent State Central Committeemen like the voting of vacant precincts. They rely on it as insurance. It's the only reason the practice was put in the State Party's internal rules in the first place. It's the very rare situation where the voting of vacant precincts helps a challenger, and this year was no exception.

 

So once again we have an un-directly elected State Central Committee not doing its job. The Will County fiasco was entirely foreseeable, and yet a simple fix was deliberately rejected in advance. It's yet another example of what happens when there is no accountability. It's just one more reason why we need to return to directly electing the members of our State Central Committee. We need to stop fooling around and finally pass SB600.

 

 

Doug Ibendahl is a Chicago Attorney and a former General Counsel of the Illinois Republican Party. He is Co-Founder of Republican Young Professionals (RYP).