You know you’re doing something right when they’re fighting you as hard as the Chicago machine is fighting us!

Since mid-January 2018, Democrat-controlled election authorities in Chicago and Cook County have:

  • Announced a snap primary to fill a vacancy on the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District by write-in-vote only—less than a week before the filing deadline for write-in candidates.
  • Refused to hold a Green Party primary in the City of Chicago—meaning no ballots, meaning no place for voters to write in the name of the Green Party candidate.
  • Held a primary in suburban Cook County in which voters at dozens of polling places were falsely told that there was no option to vote Green, and that the only options were Democrat and Republican—once again denying voters a place to write in the name of the Green party candidate.

It’s an incredible amount of effort to expend defending a single seat on a waste treatment agency’s Board of Commissioners from any ballot-listed challengers, and it made it impossible for the Green Party to secure the needed number of write-in votes for the fifth seat (called the “Vacancy of Bradford” seat) in the March primary.

The good news: five seats are still in play on the nine-member Board of Commissioners! 

The Green Party may still place its nominee, Geoffrey Cubbage, on the November ballot by filing a “vacancy of nomination” petition. But to do it, we’ll need to submit petitions signed by over 3,000 Cook County voters, by June 3rd of this year.

Can you help us make this a contested election? Republicans never filed a candidate for the “Vacancy of Bradford” nomination, so the Green Party is the only party positioned to challenge all five Board of Commissioner seats this year.

Here’s how you can help out:

  • Sign up to circulate petitions on our Volunteer page! (Or, if you prefer, just email campaign@mwrd-ilgp.org and let us know you want to be involved.) You can download the petition sheets and the petitioner’s guide and start gathering signatures right away, or we can bring a clipboard and printed materials out to you if needed. Even just a few sheets signed by friends and family helps!
  • Spread the word on social media! Share this post (Facebook link – Twitter link), and tell your friends that you’re fighting for one of the most basic democratic rights in the world: the ability to have a choice between candidates when you go to the voting booth.
  • Donate to the campaign! We take no corporate donations, so individual, small-dollar contributions are the only thing keeping us going. (Did you know that, on average, each petition signature ends up costing roughly a dollar, even with volunteer circulators, due to printing, supply, and filing-related costs? That means if we raise just $3000, we should easily be able to make our goal!)

This is a critical opportunity to directly challenge one of Chicago’s most corrupt institutions—but only if we collect the needed signatures, putting five Greens on the ballot for five seats!