While events on Halloween usually consist of spooky tales, the
Journal for Social Justice and Center for Public Interest Law hosted a
Halloween two-hour lunch Symposium discussing a different fright: election
corruption. Four speakers discussed a range of corruption tactics used
in Chicago elections; Emily Miller of the Better Government Association,
Rey Lopez-Calderon of Common Cause Illinois, Ami Gandhi of the
Southeast Asia Research and Policy Center, and Maryam Judar of Citizens
Advocacy Center educated a mixed audience of students, professors and
praticitioners. Participants left the event with a new sense of the
state of our democracy.
Topics included minority vote repression, langauge discrimination
at polling sites, voter intimidation, and re-districting. Ms. Miller
spoke on the importance of identifying corruption in local elections:
Illinois has the most local units of government in the United States and
51% of these seats are uncontested in elections. In DuPage County,
re-districting was a factor in uncontested elections. Competitors that
posed a threat to incumbents in previous elections were re-districted
out of the election. Mr. Lopez-Calderon spoke on his organization's
pilot program to combat corruption in Cicero, IL, where community
members and lawyers were trained in election law and monitored polling
sites for fraud. Common Cause was successful in their pilot program and
will monitor again during the Presidential Election.
Comments