Explaining The Rahm Replacement Election Snag

By Marcus Gilmer in News on Jan 9, 2009 5:40PM

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.