Reform for Illinois cheers election process

But more reforms necessary, says ED Alisa Kaplan, and wider ballot access granted in pandemic may not stick

Reform for Illinois cheers the way the state conducted the November election, but urges more reforms to clean up corruption in Springfield. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)

By Ted Cox

Reform for Illinois, the state’s leading political watchdog, applauds the way the November election went off.

“Overall, I think people felt really good about the election,” said Alisa Kaplan, executive director of Reform for Illinois. “We had the highest turnout in many years” in Illinois, 72.9 percent, as a record 6.1 million votes were cast among the 8.4 million registered voters, also a record.

“Credit” for that, if you can call it that, belongs of course to COVID-19, which encouraged states including Illinois to adopt long-sought reforms widening access to mail-in ballots.

“We had been working on expansions of vote by mail before this happened,” Kaplan said. “And then when the pandemic came along it just opened up all these opportunities to get this issue in front of people, and all of a sudden there was a lot more interest in it.

“I think it went great. There have been no substantiated allegations of serious fraud or significant fraud,” she added. And Kaplan believes it’s going to stick, saying, “I think it’s going to have beneficial downstream consequences for voting reform and voting access and bring our election system really into a new era.”

But other concessions granted during the pandemic may not last, such as the diminished number of signatures required to get on the ballot in state races. “There is so much political investment and partisan investment around ballot access,” Kaplan said, “I would imagine that there would be resistance to making any meaningful changes, permanent changes in that direction.

“In Illinois, petitions have been weaponized,” she added. “I don’t think anyone wants a clown-car situation where just anybody can be on the ballot. There should be reasonable hurdles so you have serious candidates.” But as it stands too many serious candidates (and, no, Kanye West doesn’t count) have their access blocked by restrictive election-petition laws, and those laws of course are written by the incumbents.

So are campaign-finance laws, but there Reform for Illinois has had more success winning people (and politicians) over to its side through the aptly named Illinois Sunshine website, which keeps track of campaign contributions as they’re filed with the Illinois Board of Elections and then automatically tweets them out on Twitter, shining some extra light on some glaring contributions as well.

“It’s a very heavily visited site that seems to be useful to a lot of people,” Kaplan said — reporters, voters, political organizations, and other candidates among them. “I think it’s just a really valuable tool for people to know not just who’s contributing to other elected officials, but who’s influencing their elected officials. That’s fundamentally what Illinois Sunshine is about.”

But last year also saw those contributors adopt a tried and true political ploy — the Friday-night news dump, which they converted into the Friday contribution dump in an attempt to slip money past voters while they were occupied over the weekend. “This year was both exciting and a little infuriating because there were a lot of Friday-night drops, especially in the Fair Tax fight — millions of dollars coming through at 6 or 7 o’clock on a Friday evening,” Kaplan said. “No matter how long I’ve been in this business, I haven’t gotten used to the level of money involved in Illinois politics. It astounds me every election — and even between elections.”

Reform for Illinois and the Better Government Association are on the record seeking to change one exemption to the 2009 campaign-finance law adopted in the wake of Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s impeachment, which they refer to as the “self-funding loophole.” That allows politicians to eliminate standing contribution limits by contributing $250,000 themselves to their own campaign in statewide elections, or just over $100,000 in individual state House and Senate races. It’s become so commonplace, some politicians just “loan” $100,001 to their own campaigns to turn off the contribution limits.

Given how that 2009 reform law granted immense power to the state party leaders, Reform for Illinois and the BGA have pointed to how House Speaker Michael Madigan, head of the Democratic Party of Illinois, collected more than half of the $17.4 million contributed to his campaign war chests between 2016 and 2018 from donations of $500,000 or more, while House Minority Leader Jim Durkin collected two-thirds of his $9.2 million the same way, and former Senate Minority Leader Bill Brady drew almost half his $3.4 million from large contributions.

Kaplan pointed out that exemption was intended to “level the playing field” between wealthy and non-wealthy candidates, taking the gloves off for both sides, but it’s been abused by those with deep pockets and backers with even deeper pockets.

“We’re the only state that has that. There’s no other state that has that exemption,” Kaplan said. “We haven’t taken the position that it should be abolished, but we do believe that it should be reformed to address some of these, frankly, absurd consequences that we’re getting.”

Reformers could alter the campaign limits in a self-funded campaign, or disallow the exemption to kick in with a campaign loan, or change the law granting so much leeway to party leaders, although that’s unlikely to happen even with Madigan facing calls for his resignation after he was all but named in a federal investigation into a ComEd bribery scheme last summer.

Reform for Illinois immediately called on Madigan to resign, and six months later it stands by that even as he seeks reelection as speaker in the General Assembly this week. “We don’t believe it’s necessary to wait for a criminal indictment,” Kaplan said. “The standard for leadership should be higher than a criminal indictment.”

But what Reform for Illinois would like to see adopted is a publicly financed Clean Elections program. That would appear unlikely, given the state’s budget crunch in the pandemic, “although the amount of money involved is really minuscule, especially for the benefits,” Kaplan said. “If you think about the costs of corruption, then the costs of preventing corruption become much more appealing.”

Then there’s the separate issue of so-called dark money in politics, contributed through Super Political Action Committees, oftentimes with anonymous donors. “It’s very hard to measure,” Kaplan said. “It is an increasing problem,” as in the retention race of former Illinois Supreme Court Judge Thomas Kilbride, hit by a series of attack ads connecting him with Madigan where it wasn’t always clear who or what organization was attacking him. Congressional candidate Betsy Dirksen Londrigan faced similar ads in her campaign against U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis.

“People are going to do their best to hide their role in these campaigns,” Kaplan said. “It’s usually not in their interest to have their names out there. So as long as the law allows them to hide they’ll do that. We should be looking for ways to prevent them from doing that.” She pointed to laws enacted in California and Massachusetts requiring top donors to be identified in political ads.

Reform for Illinois is also pursuing new ethics legislation, and it intends to monitor the upcoming remap process across the state for any signs of gerrymandering.

“I think our work has never been more important,” Kaplan said. “I think in the past couple of years, both at the federal level and at the state level, we’ve seen corruption at heights that no citizen should have to endure from their government. And we’ve seen money — which may take the form of legal corruption, the way money works in our campaign-finance system — more big money and more concentration of power among a very, very few, very, very wealthy men. And they are almost always men.” She said that only plays into the organization’s mission “not only exposing that and exposing how money changes hands,” but also “how important it is to be constantly thinking of ways that we can reform the system so that it’s not taken over by just a couple of people who are, let’s face it, extremely unrepresentative of the people that the government actually has to serve.”

Their proposed reforms, she added, are “meant to address a culture of impunity and trying to turn that into a culture of accountability in Springfield.”

It’s been a long struggle to achieve that as well as Reform for Illinois has already, but it doesn’t look to be over any time soon.