Forrest Claypool, the county commissioner who left the Democratic party to run as independent candidate for Cook County assessor, says he'll file petitions today signed by more than 90,000 voters in his bid to get on the ballot in November.
Claypool is running against Democrat Joseph Berrios, a board of review commissioner and chairman of the party, Republican Sharon Strobeck-Eckersall, a former Evanston assessor, and the Green Party's Robert Grota.
Claypool announced his candidacy in early April, angering Democrats by leaving the party and running without having participated in the primary. He needed to garner 25,000 signatures to get on the ballot, and expects a tough challenge from election lawyers retained by the Berrios campaign.
"I think they've already been very explicity with what they're going to do," Claypool said this morning as he removed the two-and-a-half foot tall stack of signatures from a North Side bank vault. "They're literally boasting about that."
But Manuel Galvan, spokesman for the Berrios campaign, says the practice of challenging signatures is common, and the showdown in the assessor's race has been blown out of proportion by the media.
"It's no big deal. It's just a standard practice," he say.s "The Claypool camp is also making a big deal about needing so many signatures. Maybe he should have run in the primary; he would have needed fewer signatures."
Unless the campaign makes fundamental errors in gathering signatures, 90,000 should be plenty, says Dick Simpson, a professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He says Claypool's candidacy is a threat to Berrios.
"Normally you try and throw off candidates who are weak, third-party candidates or others that are going to cut into your base. In this case, I suspect its much more than that on Berrios’ part. If he could get Claypool off the ballot, he will have won the election."
Claypool says the campaign was very careful about who it enlisted to circulate petitions. A media advisory this morning noted no volunteers circulated petitions for Republican, Democrat or Green Party candidates ahead of the February primary. Many had never worked for a campaign before.
"The number of people who came out and volunteered to take on the machine and corruption was gratifying," Claypool said.
He will deliver the 6,500-page, 75-pound stack of documents to County Clerk David Orr's office this afternoon. Signature challenges can be made until June 28.i