Over the past three years, his blog has tracked the litany of shocking stories coming out of Chicago area judicial elections — shocking, that is, for anywhere except Cook County. There, it seems, the sulfurous mix of identity politics, voter ignorance, and unscrupulous candidates is a way of life.
This week, the Chicago Sun-Times and Injustice Watch added another depressing data point: “sham” judicial candidates who are placed on the ballot simply to confuse voters and throw the election. Here’s how it is alleged to work: when it appears that a candidate preferred by the city’s Democratic establishment is at risk of losing a judicial race, one or more “sham” candidates will enter the race and be added to the ballot. The “sham” candidates are not real, in the sense that they expend no money on the campaign, conduct no campaign events (and often barely have a campaign website), and don’t seem sincerely interested in a judicial post. But these “sham” candidates do have something in common: names that appeal to voters’ identity politics (which is Chicago, translates mostly to feminine -sounding first names and Irish surnames). The expectation is that voters, who have done no research on the judicial candidates on the ballot, will simply vote for those who sound like Irish-American women. (And there is proof that this expectation plays out in real life.) The “sham” candidates confuse enough voters to draw votes away from the non-establishment candidate, allowing the establishment candidate to prevail.
It’s doesn’t always work. The article, for example, relates how the presence of alleged “sham” candidate Bonnie McGrath in 2016 was not enough to prevent the victory of non-establishment candidate Carol Gallagher. And the alleged “sham” candidates have protested that despite their utter lack of campaign activity, their desire to be judges is sincere. But let’s be honest: the entire process is still shameful — or at least it should be, if the party bosses behind this ruse were capable of shame.
The Interdependent Third Branch 