Democrat Andrea Raila’s bid to run for Cook County assessor suffered a serious blow Thursday, when county election officials kicked her off the March 20 primary ballot.

Raila, though, said she will appeal in court. If a judicial ruling doesn’t reverse the Cook County Electoral Board’s decision, the Democratic primary will feature a one-on-one matchup between two-term incumbent Joe Berrios and asset manager Fritz Kaegi.

The Electoral Board signed off on a recommendation made last week by hearing officer Christopher Agrella, who found a “pattern of fraud” within the Raila campaign’s collection of petition signatures to run for office. That alleged fraud wiped out thousands of signatures, putting her below the threshold needed to get on the ballot.

After the board ruled Thursday in a brief hearing in a basement room at the Cook County office building downtown, Raila said the fix was in with county election officials wanting her out of the way.

“I’m disappointed, but frankly I think that when there’s corruption at the bottom, it seeps to the top,” Raila said. “That has been the problem with the assessor’s office, the assessor’s office has been corrupted from the bottom and it seeped to the top. And that’s what I’m fighting for, to become the next assessor. And in this objection process, the corruption is here, it’s in the bottom of the basement and it floats to the top, even with the leaders, and I’m ashamed.”

Raila gave her own campaign $100,000 on the same day the county Electoral Board ruled, according to a filing with the state Board of Elections.

After the hearing officer made his recommendation last week, a spokeswoman for the Berrios campaign tried to persuade one of the two people who challenged Raila’s petition to withdraw her objection, the Tribune has reported. That effort ultimately bore no fruit. Raila, too, said she talked to both objectors about withdrawing, also to no avail.

The Kaegi campaign wants Raila off the ballot, thinking it has a better shot at unseating Berrios in a one-on-one race. After the board ruled, Kaegi campaign manager Rebecca Reynolds released a statement applauding the decision. “We look forward to focusing squarely on defeating Joe Berrios, because the voters deserve an Assessor who operates fairly, transparently and professionally — and that’s what’s at stake in this election,” Reynolds said.

The Berrios campaign declined to comment on the decision.

Berrios is seen as vulnerable in the wake of the “The Tax Divide” series published by the Tribune and ProPublica Illinois.

That series concluded that his office’s assessments, which are used to calculate property tax bills, favors wealthier owners of residential and commercial properties at the expense of poorer owners, who end up picking up more of the overall tax tab as a result.

On Thursday, a much-anticipated independent study said that Berrios has been producing error-ridden property assessments that effectively punished poor homeowners while providing tax breaks to wealthy ones.

hdardick@chicagotribune.com