Election Night could turn out to be an electoral educational experience

I’ll be the first to admit I pay far too much attention to the details by which we elect people to political office. But it still always manages to shock me a bit the degree to which the voters don’t truly comprehend the way our system works.

Signs like these will be in abundance on Tuesday

It takes the off-beat Election Nights in order to get people to see all the ways in which things can go haywire. And then, their usual reaction is to complain about how someone must be behaving corruptly.

IT CAN’T JUST be the complications of counting up all the ballots that the electorate manages to cast – as though they think we’re entitled to have an accurate computation of the ballots within minutes of the polls closing! Anything else must be the result of someone ‘cooking’ the books – most likely to benefit the corrupt ‘Machine’ candidates.

Even though the days of the old “Machine politics” in Chicago really is dead and buried. If things really were that rigidly controlled by the establishment, there’s no way we’d have 14 candidates running for mayor on Tuesday, and the potential for chaos that we could see.

What’s at stake is the fact that we have so many candidates and the likelihood that no one is going to take an overwhelming count of the vote in their favor.

Which means this is an election that will be so close, we’re likely to see absentee ballots – those people who fill out their form at home and send them in through the U.S. Postal Service to the Board of Elections – come into play.

ELECTIONS BOARD OFFICIALS admit some 63,000 such ballots have been requested, with only 26,000 of them having been sent back in by Monday.

That makes for some 37,000 people contemplating filing their ballot by mail, but literally waiting until the absolute last minute before submitting it. Which according to the law, is Tuesday. The ballots have to be put in the mail box in time so they can get a Tuesday, Feb. 26 post mark. Which means they won’t even be received by city officials until week’s end.

Or, if you’re in a particularly sarcastic mode of thought, some time next month – if the Postal Service lives up to its usual standards of pokey delivery time.

A touch of privacy, while ensuring poll watchers can see no illicit activity

Meaning it would be downright irresponsible for anybody to think that the election tallies available to be counted Tuesday night will be the final outcome. There’s bound to be a cluster of candidates crammed at the top of the vote tallies so as to make it unrealistic to say just who the Top Two vote getters will be.

YOU ALSO JUST know that whoever finishes third or fourth is bound to clutch to the belief that all the mail-in ballots will contain enough voter support to push them over the top and into the run-off election to be held April 2.

It’s going to be oh, so strange for those people who tune into a 9 p.m. television newscast Tuesday expecting to learn who won – only to be told it might be too close to call.

They won’t want to understand, because they’ve become too used to expecting Election Night results by then – with candidates making victory or concession speeches during the 9 p.m. hour, and thinking of anyone who refuses to make such a statement by then as being some sort of sore loser who just can’t face reality.

When the reality really is this can be a complex process to ensure that all votes are properly counted. It will take time. That could be the lesson of Election 2019 – just as Election 2000 was the one that made many of us realize just how easily it was for a ballot to be tampered with to the point of being uncountable.

REMEMBER ALL THE talk of “hanging chads?” And how repulsed the "W." Bush people were that they couldn't immediately celebrate their political victory -- trying concoct scenarios in which none-other-than Bill Daley himself was trying to stead a "win" away from them?

I still do, and must admit that what through me for a loop was that many people weren’t more fully aware of this. Just as I’m sure now many really expect all the hundreds of thousands of voters who cast ballots Tuesday can all be fully accounted for within an hour or two.

Just an example of the off-beat locations pressed into polling place duty

There is, however, one plus. If it really takes a couple of weeks before we can be sure exactly who won Tuesday and by how much, it’s going to mean that the run-off election is coming to come up on us right away.

There just won’t be that much time left for the two mayoral finalists to campaign against each other. As far as I’m concerned, that makes for few political cheap-shots and rhetorical attacks against each other – good riddance!

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Are Chuy’s black vote bloc supporters enough to overcome Emanuel lead?

The campaign of challenger Jesus Garcia is giving big play to the endorsements it received from the Rev. Jesse Jackson and former mayoral dreamer Willie Wilson – who tried running a campaign that was supposed to take advantage of African-American discontent with Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

But what should we think of the mayoral run-off election just a little over three weeks away?

THERE ARE THOSE people whose political leanings these days are Anybody But Rahm who want to believe that we’re going to see an overwhelming black voter support combine with the Latino voter support that Garcia already seems to have from last month’s municipal elections.

The result would be a dumping of Rahm that would be politically humiliating and completely ruin any shot he has as a lasting political career.

Then again, every time Emanuel appears on a ballot there is always a segment of the electorate that takes the idea of defeating him to be a personal crusade – and they never seem to prevail in the end.

Which is why I’m not surprised by the Chicago Tribune-published polls on Friday that showed Emanuel developing a significant lead over Garcia – some 51 percent to 37 percent.

THAT DIFFERS FROM past polls that showed Emanuel with only a slight lead over Garcia and nearly 20 percent of the potential electorate undecided. Could it be that all those nice, soft, warm-and-fuzzy television campaign spots that have aired in recent weeks have caused some people to lighten up on their political hostility?

Could it be that Emanuel winds up prevailing on April 7 because there won’t be some sudden burst of outrage – and that apathy might wind up being the lasting sentiment that comes out of this election cycle?

It’s why I thought that the roughly 66 percent of registered voters who couldn’t be bothered to cast ballots back in February was the most significant statistic – and one that might be matched come three weeks from Tuesday.

As for the recent Garcia endorsements, I’m really unimpressed with the Wilson activity – which might have been game-changing if he had come out hard and strong for Chuy in the days following the Feb. 24 elections.

BUT THE WHOLE process of “Who will Willie want?” dragged out to the point where I’m sure it played out as indifference on his part. Combined with the fact that Wilson said he listened to Emanuel pitches for an endorsement, I’m sure some think that Wilson was more about puffing up his own ego.

It will be interesting to see if he’s even the least bit relevant politically in future years – or if his few weeks of campaigning earlier this year were the extent to which he was a political persona.

I also find various newspaper reports concerning the City Council’s views on the mayoral race to be intriguing. As in black aldermen saying publicly they back Emanuel (on the grounds that they want the incumbent to remain so things don’t get shaken up for them), but aren’t really all that enthusiastic about him.

While when it comes to Latino aldermen, it seems the bulk of elected officials with Latin American ethnic origins are more solidly for Emanuel – they really want to be a part of the political establishment, and don’t want to risk the notion that Garcia’s vision of a future Chicago would not include them.

IT DOESN’T EXACTLY reek of a mood demanding change in our political structure. It makes me skeptical that there’s any racial or ethnic revolution in store for us next month.

While I don’t doubt the sincerity of those people who are bad-mouthing Rahm Emanuel the loudest these days, I just wonder if there’s enough of them to seriously impose any sort of change.

And if all the people who held off getting too excited about the gubernatorial election cycle last year because they wanted to focus their public attention on this year’s mayoral cycle will wind up feeling a bit foolish.

Because I’m sure a Bruce Rauner/Rahm Emanuel pairing as the two top public officials on our local political scene ultimately will be their worst nightmare come true!

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Will Preckwinkle put herself in harm’s way by daring to endorse Garcia?

Could it be that Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle is getting so much political pressure that she’s now feeling compelled to give an endorsement to her county board ally, Jesus Garcia, in his bid to become Chicago mayor?

It would seem so. Because although Preckwinkle remained neutral during the first part of the municipal election cycle and earlier this week told the Chicago Sun-Times “that’s where I still am,” it is now being reported that Preckwinkle could still wind up becoming a Chuy backer come the April 7 run-off election.

FROM A POLITICAL standpoint, it makes a certain amount of sense for Preckwinkle to stay out of this campaigning. She has to work with the current mayor, who could still wind up winning.

The last thing she wants is for Rahm Emanuel to win re-election to another four year term against her opposition. It would make her look weak AND probably result in Emanuel feeling the need to spite her politically every opportunity he got.

Governments work better when there’s a certain level of cooperation between them. Nobody wins if Emanuel and Preckwinkle become mortal enemies and the local political scene devolves into a city versus inner suburbs fight!

So while she might not be all that enthused about Emanuel, Preckwinkle still has to work with him – at least through early May and possibly for much longer.

IT’S THE REASON she wasn’t enthused about running herself for mayor in this election cycle – even though there were a number of Anybody But Rahm-ers out there who would eagerly have taken up the cause of the long-time Hyde Park resident as our city’s chief executive.

It actually wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for Preckwinkle to offer Garcia her support. Both are of the progressive ideological streak that political people like Emanuel view to be too impractical to actually get anything done.

There’s also the fact that during his four-plus years on the Cook County Board, Garcia has been a solid Preckwinkle backer. He has supported just about everything she has tried to accomplish.

I don’t doubt that on a personal level, she’d find it to be much easier to deal with a “Mayor Garcia” than she ever has to cope with Emanuel.

BUT IT’S GOING to come down to whether Preckwinkle ever gets the impression that Garcia could win this mayoral election on his own.

In which case, she’s going to want to become one of Chuy’s people so she can claim to be on the winning team. She’s like those people who back in 2006 started showing up at U.S. Cellular Field to bask in the glory of the Chicago White Sox winning the World Series the year before.

Once the team’s luster faded, they stopped showing.

If Garcia can get the luster of a winning candidate, she and many other political people will suddenly find their way to backing his campaign.

UNFORTUNATELY FOR GARCIA, he’s at a point where he probably needs the backing of people like Preckwinkle (and the money of the Service Employees International Union political action committees) to give him that luster.

Somebody’s going to have to be willing to take a risk and stick their neck out, or else Emanuel’s resources likely will give him a slim victory in the run-off election.

This may sound weak, but it’s actually appropriate. Because I still remember back in 2008 during the Democratic presidential primary when our then-Congressman from the northwest side waited until the day Hillary R. Clinton dropped out before he would formally endorse Barack Obama for president.

Emanuel himself wasn’t willing to stick his neck out to back the “favorite son” candidate for whom he later became chief of staff. I suppose it shouldn’t be any more surprising that Preckwinkle hesitates to become a Chuy person.

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Republicans the key to Chicago electoral victory? Wilson thinks so!

I have known Republican partisans who live in Chicago who privately will admit it to be a complete embarrassment that their preferred political party is so irrelevant in the Second City.

Gov. Bruce Rauner is said to have won a major electoral victory last November when he took about 21 percent of the Chicago vote – which as I see it means that Rauner was more irrelevant to Chicagoans than 2012 presidential hopeful Mitt Romney was to Latinos.

SO WHAT SHOULD we think of the fact that mayoral hopeful Willie Wilson made an appeal to those Chicagoans whose ideology is so intense that they refuse to call themselves Democrats (you have to be dedicated to partisanship to be a Chicago Republican, since you get nothing for it in return).

I don’t know how successful a tactic it will be – although I comprehend that Wilson merely wants to get enough votes to finish in second place. He doesn’t care if he comes anywhere close to the roughly 42 percent support that various polls show Mayor Rahm Emanuel to have for the Feb. 24 municipal elections.

Republicans don’t win city elections all that often; they don’t even come close to it. The fact that Chicago is so overwhelmingly Democratic is why party officials think they can ignore the rest of Illinois when it comes to state elections or for elections to federal office.

Heck, the only time in our lifetimes that many local voters paid attention to the Republican candidate for mayor was when racial considerations were a factor and certain people just couldn’t accept black candidates as fully legitimate of the Democratic Party.

WOULD ANYONE HAVE even thought of Bernard Epton if not for racial hang-ups?

Although perhaps this is the evidence that Chicago has changed in recent decades if the real Republicans are willing to turn to a black man as a chance to take down a Democrat as Chicago mayor.

Because I don’t doubt that GOPers would love to be able to say they defeated Emanuel, even if it meant giving votes to Wilson.

Although it should be noted that the political parties have changed enough that I suspect these days, Epton (a Jewish person of liberal political leanings) could not get the Republican nomination to run for anything!

FOR THE RECORD, I’m bringing all this up because Wilson was to appear Sunday night at a Chicago Republican Party gathering held in the Greektown neighborhood.

Which means a few dozen Republicans (out of the 2.7 million city residents) got together at a restaurant and enjoyed a meal together while trying to convince themselves that they’re not miniscule and irrelevant.

Wilson told the DNAinfo.com website that he’s not seeking the GOP nomination – he still considers himself a Democrat in this officially nonpartisan election where Wilson and three other Dems are taking on Emanuel.

Perhaps Wilson thinks he can get the Republican voters to consider him because they don’t officially have a candidate – just like they didn’t have any candidates for Cook County offices in last year’s election cycle?

I’M JUST TOO convinced that there are too few Republicans to make a difference – and that this could still turn out to be an April 7 runoff election for mayor between Emanuel and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia.

The polls have consistently shown Wilson to have about 7 percent support – usually behind everybody except for William “Dock” Walls, who will be lucky if he garners 1 percent voter support.

The key to a Wilson second place finish is for him to find some segment of the Chicago electorate that’s now being ignored by these polls; so he can have a surprise surge in support come next Tuesday. Although I don’t think there are enough Republican partisans in Chicago to do such a thing.

So excuse me for being skeptical that Wilson accomplished much of anything Sunday night – other than freezing in those 10-degree temperatures that felt much worse due to wind chill! Let’s hope for his sake the GOP at least gave him a decent meal.

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