The governor called the legislation an “ethics bill,” a bill titled DCFS-CHILD WELFARE GOALS (amending Department of Children and Family Services child placement) that ultimately changed election law and limited voter choices.
Was this an ethics bill or a threat to democracy?
It happened in Illinois this past May when, in less than 48 hours, the governor and his unscrupulous supporters conspired to deceptively change a historic election law amid an election cycle.
The hurriedly passed legislation changed a long-established election law that provided for a process known as slating. The slating process was equally available to both Republicans and Democrats. The process allowed established political parties to select a candidate to be added to a ballot in an election where there was no primary candidate.
This process was typically important to voters in elections that were otherwise an unopposed race for an incumbent. Without such a process, voter’s choice would be limited to the single choice of the incumbent.
Understanding the candidate slating process points to the disturbing facts about its demise.
First, the slating process, as it had existed, was part of Illinois election law for a long time. The Illinois Constitution does not specifically provide for election law details, and the laws developed over time based on the custom and practice as to how the major parties operated. The practices were eventually codified into law including the slating process which can be traced back a half century, and which some commentors indicate is a process that is just about as old as the state of Illinois itself, some two centuries.
Next, as a long-established process, voters would have come to rely on slating to increase their choice at the ballot box. Despite such reliance, the legislature introduced, passed and changed the election law within 48 hours. By design there was no allowance for public comment or debate.
In an orchestrated act, the legislation was immediately signed into law by the governor. The coordinated series of events reek of collusion to eliminate fourteen candidates from the ballot in the upcoming election.
Yet most disturbing is that this elimination of voter choice occurred during an ongoing election cycle. This can be nothing less than election interference.
The current election cycle began in September 2023 with the start of the primary election. While part of the overall election process, slating does not begin until the end of the primary election when primary vacancies are finalized, typically where there is an unopposed incumbent.
For the current election cycle, the primary occurred in March 2024. A 75 day window to identify, slate, certify a candidate, and then complete the filing requirement ended June 3.
But in the midst of this election, the Democrat supermajority in Springfield passed legislation to end the slating process on May 3, and block 14 candidates from the November ballot. The media widely reported the offered justifications for ending the slating route and blocking 14 candidates from the ballot.
The Democratic Illinois Senate president in an apparent effort to smear the slating process insinuated that candidates “appeal to local party bosses to have them installed as the candidate.” And while signing the election law amendment into law on May 3, the Governor of Illinois amplified the deception by calling the bill that eliminated candidates an "ethics bill."
While the governor and senate president comments framed the slating process as some sort of smoke-filled backroom politicking, the facts point to the elimination of slating and voter choices as a product of the Democrats' own backroom collusion.
Unlike the innuendo about how the slating process works, let me speak about how the process works to bring more choice to voters from my own experience. In recent years, I have been active in the local Republican township organization and served as a Republican election judge. Because I worked on Election Day as an election judge during the March primary, I early-voted at the local village hall. My early voting reminded me that there was no Republican primary candidate for State Representative in district where I reside (sic).
Then while I worked as an election judge on Election Day, I reflected on how no primary candidates would limit voter choices in the upcoming general election. About the time of the primary, I also attended the local township Republican organization’s regular meeting. In an open public forum, a request was made for a volunteer to fill a Republican candidate vacancy in the upcoming general election. I thought it over, openly asked others who I felt more qualified, and when no one else stepped up, I volunteered to be that candidate.
Things were put into motion, and I was formally slated and certified in April to run as a Republican candidate for State Representative in District No. 53. So, the deliberate misrepresentations fostered by the Democrat supermajority in Springfield that the slating process involves some sort of “appeal to party bosses” is just a misleading fabrication with an aim to eliminate voter choices.
There was no appeal to the bosses, but instead in a public forum, a volunteer, who was motivated by a civic duty to provide voters more choices, stepped up. Clearly, given the extremely deceptive, coordinated, and expedited timing in changing election law, the only semblance of “appealing to party bosses” is the collusion of the governor and Illinois Democrats to exercise more dictatorial control over voter choices by eliminating a long standing and accepted election process.
The Democrats seemed to act more like thugs than reasoned legislators, some of whom are lawyers and should know better, like the governor. And to make such a clandestine change to Illinois election law amid an election cycle already underway is nothing less than election interference, and a true threat to democracy.
This is nothing new for Democrats, and the attempt to kick 14 Illinois candidates off the ballot needs to be put into current and historic perspectives. As an attorney admitted to the Illinois bar, I am interested in and follow legal issues around the upcoming November general election. An important issue is the threat to democracy caused by election interference, an issue where Democrats seem to ignore ethical bounds. This issue appears both in federal and state elections.
Most recently, as presented above, changes in Illinois election laws and candidate slating provides a good example. The intent of Democrats is often blatantly the same across a variety of elections and is aimed to maintain and expand control by limiting voter choices by kicking the opposition off the ballot. Whether it is the election of an Illinois State Representative, the blocking of an independent minded Democratic candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from the Democratic presidential ballot, or the election of a Republication presidential candidate, Democrats will go to whatever extreme, and without ethical consideration, to interfere with an election they want to control.
On the federal level, consider the election for the President of the United States where Illinois was one of several states that tried to block the leading Republican candidate from the ballot. In Illinois, as in a few other states, the plaintiffs relied on the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution and on written reports about the riots gone wrong on Jan. 6, 2021, which arguably under federal evidentiary standards may at best be considered inadmissible hearsay.
What happened in Illinois is instructive. Forum shopping to remove the Republican presidential candidate blatantly took place in Illinois. An initial legal action was brought before the Illinois State Board of Elections, a venue knowledgeable in election law. In January 2024, the Springfield based Illinois State Board of Elections voted 8-0 to reject a challenge to remove a Republican presidential candidate from the November ballot. This did not stop the plaintiffs in deeply Democratic Illinois from seeking another venue.
Forum shopping has been around for a long time and is a known tactic to leverage the legal system to advantage one litigant over the other. It has pluses and minuses. A forum change may allow defendants to have a more just outcome. Unfortunately, forum shopping can border on the unethical if forums that are openly biased are sought. In Illinois, politically motivated individuals that were not happy with the Board of Elections ruling decided to find a forum that would limit voter choices by removing a Republican presidential candidate from the ballot. This was accomplished after losing at the Board of Elections, by filing a subsequent suit in a lower judicial court in Democrat dominated Chicago, not particularly known for election law jurisprudence. The result in late February 2024 was a county judge ruled to limit voter choices and remove a Republican presidential candidate from the ballot (emphasis in original).
The ultimate outcome of the Illinois case hinged on a related Colorado federal election interference case that made its way to the United States Supreme Court. In March 2024, the Colorado Presidential election interference case was decided by the United States Supreme Court. An important unanimous 9-0 decision.
As it is said the court spoke with one voice in a court that often has differing viewpoints. Such unanimous Supreme Court decisions hold a special and important position in jurisprudence. It is an opinion worth reading. As the court point out presidential elections hold a special place under the United States Constitution and the court made it clear that states cannot limit voter choices in a presidential election by controlling candidate access to the ballot. The legal reasoning centered on the infringement of voter constitutional rights and due process and equal protection guarantees.
The Supreme Court case also had the effect of settling the Illinois presidential election interference case in favor of expanded candidate choices for voters by allowing the Republican candidate on the ballot. A concurring opinion in the Supreme Court case went on to state that “the American people have the power to vote for and elect candidates for national office, and that is a great and glorious thing.” This is true for state elections also.
Yet just 60 days later Illinois’s governor decided to become a threat to democracy during an election cycle and eliminate 14 voter choices in state elections by changing election law. Again, under Illinois’s Democratic leadership, the governor and Democrat legislators clandestinely changed election law in a matter of a few hours during an on-going election.
That attempt was subsequentially challenged in court and on June 5 an Illinois Circuit Court found the new law to be unconstitutional and “a severe restriction on the fundamental right to vote.” Yet the governor persists and appealed the Circuit Court decision to the Illinois Supreme Court. Editor's note: The governor is not a party to the case before the Illinois Supreme Court. Rather, the law is being defended by Illinois House Speaker Emanuel "Chris" Welch.
Clearly, Illinoisians deserve better than a governor that embraces an unconstitutional act as an “ethics bill”, but this will only change at the ballot box. The ballot box must prevail. But the peril to the ballot box is not limited to modern times.
My ties to Illinois are deep. I come from a family that has served the United Stated of America and Illinois since the time of Abraham Lincoln, and thus I have a personal interest in the history of this state and Lincoln. So, I turn from the current 2024 general election to the election of 1860, specifically, to Lincoln as a presidential candidate. At a time before the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, historians explain that elections and ballots were much different than today. In 1860 elections are characterized as open elections where there were no private ballots, but instead ballots were printed in local newspapers. The printed ballots were cut from the newspaper, and openly cast in the ballot box at the voting location. But in 1860 something familiar occurred in Democratic Southern states, states that would soon become open insurrectionists. In collusion with the mass media of the time, Southern newspapers purposely limited voter choices by removing Abraham Lincoln from the ballot. In fact, history teaches that during the 1860 presidential election campaign, you might even say that the soon to be insurrectionist Democratic states suffered from their own form of Lincoln deranged syndrome.
In fact, while the Illinois Democratic presidential candidate Stephen Douglas freely campaigned in the South, Lincoln stayed away, for the fear of death threats and his life. So, as evidenced by the voting record of 10 Democratic insurrectionist states who took Lincoln off the ballot, Lincoln got exactly zero votes. Some scholars tend to discount Lincoln being removed from the ballot by pointing to the differences in the voting methods. But regardless of differences in past and present voting methods, clearly as shown by the actual vote count, the intent and the ultimate result was the removal of the Republican presidential candidate, Lincoln, from the ballot in 10 Southern Democratic insurrectionists states.
Just look at the documented voting history. Normally, for presidential elections both before and after 1860, a major presidential candidate would get some votes. Only in the 1860 election did a major presidential candidate in 10 Democratic insurrectionist states get exactly zero votes. Clearly, 10 Democratic states deliberately removed Abraham Lincoln from the ballot. So, I take it as an honor that an unethical Illinois governor wanted to be a true threat to democracy and limit voter choice by throwing me off the ballot as in 1860 Lincoln was removed from the ballot by insurrectionist Democrats states, and in 2024, a number of states including Illinois tried to kick a Republican presidential candidate off the ballot.
Because of Illinois' governor’s onerous actions, the citizens of Illinois should ask who are the true insurrectionists that threaten the foundation of democracy: misguided rioters in Washington, D.C., Democratic run states that try to take presidential candidates off the ballot, or an Illinois governor who sanctioned election interference and limited voter choice in the midst of an election and called it ethics, and which the courts found unconstitutional?
And since Illinois’s governor described the changing of election law to eliminate voter choices during an election as an “ethics bill”, an observation on ethics is in order. As an Illinois attorney, I am required to take continuing education courses that include mandatory ethics instruction. I believe in ethics, but I wonder about the true commitment to legal ethics in Illinois. It is ironic that the Northwestern University Law School is named after an Illinois governor after receiving a substantial financial gift. At one time, I had a special respect for this institution as my smart and accomplished brother-in-law was an esteemed alumnus.
Biographical references state that Illinois’s governor graduated from Northwestern Law School. But I have lost confidence in the value of this institution when I consider the governor’s questionable conduct in the current matter of election law and restricting voter choice. And consider that in relatively recent history, four Illinois governors have been convicted on federal criminal charges: Dan Walker, Otto Kerner Jr., George Ryan and Rod Blagojevich. Interestingly, three out of the four attended Northwestern University, although Blagojevich only as an undergraduate.
The others attended Northwestern Law School.
So, considering all these alumni along with the current governor and his reckless conduct in unconstitutionally changing election law and calling it an “ethics bill”, one can only question the naming of this law institution after the governor. Maybe in honor of the governor’s “ethics bill," one could be of the opinion that a more appropriate name for the law school is the Pritzker School of Unethical Law. Or like so many once esteemed institutions such as universities and even local media, maybe the alumni and the public need to take a more critical look at these entities for a variety of reasons.
As for me, and as being born and raised in Illinois, I am still inspired by Abraham Lincoln. He literally graduated from the law school of hard work and morality. He was burdened by a Democratic Illinois. Insurrectionist Democratic states removed Lincoln as a candidate from the election ballot, and I am humbled to face election interference as Lincoln did. Lincoln was known as the Rail-Splitter and went by Honest Abe. I strive to emulate him. I wish Illinois had a governor, who is also a lawyer, that acted more like Lincoln.
Where have all the good and ethical lawyers gone? And whether Pritzker’s “ethics bill” is an unconstitutional, unethical deceptive product of backroom collusion that is a threat to democracy, time will tell. In the meantime, hopefully the citizens of Illinois are watching.
Ronald Aldermann is a Wheeling Township resident in Cook County and is seeking to run as the Republican candidate in the 53rd Representative District. He is also a co-plaintiff in the legal action now before the Illinois Supreme Court challenging the law referenced in this article.