Berrios campaign will not challenge Claypool petitions

Berrios campaign completes petition review; issues prepared statement                    

 Democratic candidate for Assessor will win with the voters, not courts. After completing an extensive review, the campaign of Joseph Berrios for Assessor has opted not to file an objection to Forrest Claypool’s petitions to get on the November ballot as an independent candidate.

This decision was made despite two-thirds of Mr. Claypool’s signatures being questionable, as well as one-third of his circulators. The campaign has said from the beginning that, in an effort to protect the integrity of the law, it would thoroughly review Mr. Claypool’s signatures.

“It would be irresponsible to subject either the public authorities or our opponent to the cost, time and effort of litigation, perhaps all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court,” said campaign spokesman Manuel Galvan. “Instead, the campaign asks Mr. Claypool to set aside the insults and empty rhetoric, and pledge to conduct a spirited, fair and clean campaign. The public deserves nothing less.”

That being said, the public also deserves to know what the campaign’s petition review found. Of the 89,913 signatures:

• Mr. Claypool personally deleted 1,301 bad signatures.
• Nearly 53,000 suspect signatures, including many who weren’t registered to vote in
• Cook County, or didn’t sign the petitions themselves or signed more than once.
• Circulator ineligibility would have reduced the total by another 6,000 signatures.
• Additionally, another 6,000 more alleged valid signatures may have been ineligible on other grounds.

Short of further legal action in the courts, the Berrios Campaign believes that there would be 30,000 to 32,000 valid signatures remaining, and the law requires 25,000 signatures to file as an independent candidate.