I recently read with some dismay Ted Slowik’s account in the Daily Southtown of the daunting and sometimes confusing process that candidates for local municipal office face when their nominating paperwork is challenged in front of their local electoral boards. His story shows that local electoral board hearings and decisions are opaque, subject to bias, and bewildering to candidates and voters alike.

Local electoral boards, often comprised of incumbents (or their allies), are by their nature integrated with local politics. Even the most well-meaning local electoral board members would be hard-pressed to absolve themselves of any and all biases they may have. This doesn’t imply that they are corrupt; they’re just human. Imagine being a candidate who must face an electoral board and the person you are challenging is one of those deciding your fate. It’s no wonder that candidates may view the handling of objections to their candidacies as intimidating, inconsistent and biased.

This can be remedied, though, by the consolidation of local and county electoral boards. The Illinois state legislature has considered such bills in the past, and I encourage the 101st General Assembly to take the idea up once again.

Consolidation of suburban Cook County’s more than 100 local electoral boards under a single entity would ensure that the process and decisions would be consistent, unbiased and just in handling of objections to candidacies, fair to both the candidates and the objectors.

This has been done before, as recently as 2014, when school board objections were transferred over to the Cook County Officers Electoral Board, which had already been hearing police, fire and sanitary district, as well as non-municipal library and park district objections.

The Cook County Officers Electoral Board handles their workload professionally and transparently. All paperwork related to board hearings — including objections, petitions, initial hearing officer decisions and final electoral board rulings — are readily and easily available to view and download from my website — no FOIA necessary. Were the local cases to come under the Cook County Electoral Board, all their case documents and schedules would also be available for scrutiny in one location.

As Mr. Slowik writes, “Running for office should be easy.” But whether they mean to or not, elected and appointed officials who sit on local electoral boards make this quite challenging. Making the objection review process consistent and transparent would not only make running for office less daunting, it would also build confidence in the integrity of the process.

Karen A. Yarbrough,

Cook County clerk

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