Results tagged “specialelection”

In an about-face from his recent calls for Senator Burris to resign and for a special election to be held to fill the U.S. Senate seat, Governor Quinn today backed off of Burris and said the focus of Illinois should instead be on things like the economy. Said Quinn:

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan issued a legal opinion late Wednesday night that says it would be legal for lawmakers to move up the date of the Senate election to choose a replacement for President Barack Obama. The opinion paves the way, at least in theory, for the state legislature to force Burris to run as a candidate in a special election if he wants to retain the seat he was appointed to by former Governor Rod Blagojevich.

Yesterday, we mentioned a potential snag in the set election dates for the primary and special elections to elect the new U.S. congressman for the fifth congressional district. We talked with James P. Allen, Communications Director of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners. Here's how he explained it:

This litigation is standard procedure with special elections. The same court action was filed last year to obtain a virtually identical court order for the 14th Congressional District special primary and special election to fill the vacancy after the resignation of U.S. Rep. Dennis Hastert.The reason is that the overall calendar in the election code on various items (candidate petition circulation, petition filing, objections, grace period, early voting, mail-in absentees, canvassing the results) is for a primary and general election that span many months, not several weeks. Thus, a court order sets the ground rules for all of the candidates up front. Additionally, such a court order would have been necessary no matter how the writ of election were issued, because the law requires both the primary and special election to be completed inside a compressed schedule of 115 days.

Now that we have that cleared up, what about the election and candidates themselves? PurelyPolitical founder/ CloutWiki co-founder/ former Chicagoist political writer Mike Fourcher has an interesting slide-show of the history and candidates of teh 5th district available for your perusal.

It seems there's a bit of a trouble with the scheduled dates of the special elections called to fill Rahm Emanuel's vacated seat in U.S. Congress. Cook County Clerk David Orr's office is required to allow 45 days between primary and election dates to allow absentee voters - including those in the military - to return their ballots. There are, however, only 35 days between the scheduled March 3 primary and April 7 election. Orr will go before a federal judge tomorrow and ask that his office be allowed to use ballots via fax and email in addition to regular mail so that the current dates, set by Gov. Rod Blagojevich, can stand.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your campaign engines. Now that Rahm Emanuel has officially resigned his Fifth U.S. Congressional District seat, it's time to pick a new representative. Beleaguered Governor Rod Blagojevich has set March 3 as the date of the primary election and April 7 as the general election. Given all the interest expressed in the seat, we put the over/under on the final number of candidates at lucky 13. Because it is, after all, the seat once occupied by Blago. [Trib]

Rahm Emanuel will be resigning his 5th U.S. Congressional District seat this Friday, January 2nd. Emanuel informed his constituents (including a few of us) of the decision via a recorded phone message. Seriously, for the first five seconds, I thought Rahm was actually returning one of my numerous phone calls; not cool! Anyway. Lynn Sweet has a list of those who have already expressed an interest in pursuing the seat and it's pretty long already: Alexander Victor Forys, Mike Quigley, Charles J. Wheelan, Sara Feigenholtz, Reichel Matthew, Joey Vartanian, Israel Vasquez, Justin Oberman, Cary Capparelli, Debra Mell, and Jan H. Donatelli. Meanwhile, Emanuel's Chicago and D.C. offices will remain open as to allow any current casework to be completed. A special election will now be scheduled to select Rahm's replacement.