The suburb where voting doesn't matter

James Johnson

The trains run on time in Skokie.

Snow is plowed in a timely manner. Garbage gets picked up. The tax base is varied and strong. The fire department is one of the best. 

Unlike Mussolini’s Fascist Party, which famously claimed to make the Italian trains run on time, but didn't, most government services seem quite efficient in the big village west of the North Shore Channel. But like Italy under the Partito Nazionale Fascista, there’s one-party rule in Skokie.

The Skokie Caucus Party has run the village since 1965. That means that few people even bother to vote anymore. In Skokie, a place where they crowd the polling places for state or federal contests as if they were headed to a Super Bowl game, the typical turnout for local elections is under 10%. Sometimes well under.

“Why is it that we have one party, one slate, one term?” asked Gail Schechter, a Skokie-based activist. “Voter disinterest has a ripple effect. It also affects the school districts, the park district. People get turned off.”

Gail Schechter

The reason why is that outmoded election practices, such as all the trustee candidates running for the same term at the same time, have never been reformed.

When it comes to municipal elections, Skokie never grew up.

There was a whopping 11% turnout for last spring’s Skokie election. The reason for the less tepid voter interest was that Billy Haido, a village board candidate picked by the Caucus to appeal to the large Assyrian-American population, was caught having posted some embarrassingly misogynist things over the previous decade.

They included a 2019 post of a painting of the Garden of Eden captioned, "Girls have a hard time choosing where to eat, because the last time they chose, they doomed all of humanity." 

The Caucus disowned Haido and airbrushed him out of the campaign photo. 

Still on the ballot with the rest of the Caucus candidates, he got a little over 2,100 votes. But independent James Johnson, who wouldn’t have had a chance otherwise, got about 600 more. He didn’t beat anyone but Haido, but it was enough.

On election night, Johnson, a 32-year-old high school teacher/environmental activist, talked about changing the electoral process so that more people could get into the Skokie game. Now he and Schechter — known for fair-housing advocacy and other progressive work — are leading a drive for a referendum to change the way things operate in Skokie.

Twenty-two people of different political leanings but interested in helping get there came to a meeting of the organization now called "Skokie Alliance for Electoral Reform" Sunday. Former Gov. Pat Quinn joined them to coach on referendum mechanics.

Skokie has three electoral components that, individually, are not unheard of, but considered together may be unique in Illinois. Skokie allows a political party system, no staggered elections, and at-large elections (no wards).

Staggered elections are the norm in bigger Illinois towns, and a lot of the smaller ones, too. If Skokie had them, the mayor and three trustees would run for four-year terms one year and the other three trustees would run two years later.

If you put the non-staggered anomaly together with a slate (read: Caucus Party), it’s hard for independent trustee candidates to prevail. They get tacked onto the ballot below the six candidates with party designation, and the voters think, accurately, what’s the point? Unless one of the members of the slate has attracted widespread enmity, all six are going to attract about the same number of votes, a number almost certainly more than any independent.

Over the decades, it’s been rare for any group to go to the trouble of mounting a slate to challenge the Skokie Caucus Party. The reason is probably those timely trains. Some people might resent the one-party rule, but they're just not ticked off enough to put themselves through those changes.

As Johnson found out, it's hard for an independent to win, and what good does it do if he does? If no Caucus candidates screw up, a successful independent has to be very special.

If a movie star were to run independently for a Skokie trustee chair, he or she might win. But there would still be five other Caucus seats, and 5-1 votes, until four years later, when a Grammy Award-winning musician could run.

One point that never came up in the “Skokie Alliance for Electoral Reform” meeting is the cost of running for office. Independent candidates have to raise their own campaign funds. All that annoying literature isn't free. 

Half of Illinois towns over 50,000 in population elect their boards or councils from wards or other districts. Skokie, with almost 68,000 people, is one of those that doesn’t. That means it’s less likely for any part of Skokie to have a trustee residents consider “theirs.” 

Aside from Johnson and one other, every Skokie board member lives on the east end of town.

James said that together, these factors have reduced the average number of candidates for each seat, for decades, to 1.1.

“Two is the minimum number for choice,” Johnson said. “People vote when their vote matters.”

It’s hard to find meaning in a Skokie municipal election, according to several of the attendees of the Sunday meeting.

“I voted for my cat,” Hugh Iglarsh said with a wink.

Fixing that situation by referendum is fraught with difficulty. Referendums are rarely easy. 

Quinn has been leading state and local referendum drives for over 40 years. One of them that didn’t work, in 2018, was a binding referendum to limit terms of Chicago mayors. He sees it as an object lesson for the Skokie folks.

The Chicago Board of Elections kept it off the ballot due to “the rule of three,” a state limit of three referendums on any ballot, Quinn noted at the Skokie meeting. The Chicago City Council had placed three non-binding referendums on the ballot before Quinn’s group could get theirs ready: one about marijuana tax income,  another about a new property tax exemption and a third on whether to ban plastic straws.

“They put on all three and ‘there ya go,’” Quinn said.

The Board was less inclined to mercy toward Quinn and his 86,000 Chicago petition signees because his petitions included two questions, making it unclear whether people wanted the term limits or an elected consumer advocate, according to reports.

Pat Quinn

Quinn told the Skokie group that he doubted that Skokie voters would want to back changes on slates, wards and staggered elections all at the same election. Johnson said that based on his own discussions with voters, they were least enamored of creating a ward system.

But Johnson said later, “I’d like to see all three at one time.” 

Quinn suggested that talking about adding term limits to the referendum list might create leverage to dissuade the Caucus party from trying to keep referendums off the ballot. After all, Skokie Mayor George Van Dusen is going on 23 years in office. Skokie has had three mayors in 58 years.

For years and years, the man to talk to about the Skokie Caucus has been, perhaps incongruously, the corporation counsel for the village, Michael Lorge. He didn't want to talk to me, but I read an October report he commissioned about why Johnson and Schechter are wrong. It was written by Mike Kreloff, the retired Democratic committeeman of Northfield Township, who has a lot of experience in this area.

“Indeed, of 135 Cook County municipalities, only 19 (14%) use districts to elect council members,” Kreloff wrote.  “The reason districts are unpopular ... is quite obvious; limiting residents to only one vote for a representative rather than maintaining the ability to have a say in all six members elected. Voters rarely support proposals that limit their voice in government.” 

This paragraph is slightly sneaky in that districts/wards make less sense in most of the 135 county towns, relatively tiny burgs like Winnetka and Deerfield, than in bigger towns like Skokie, where there are more issues affecting some neighborhoods and not others. That's why fully half the Cook County towns populated by 50,000 or more people now employ districts. Statewide, half of the 40 biggest towns have districts, too.

But Johnson sees the value of having trustees who are voted for by the whole community. So he suggests a hybrid system – voting for trustees from each of four districts, plus two at-large trustees. That's the way it's done in Wheaton, Aurora, Joliet, Champaign and Moline, he says. 

The Kreloff memo attacks staggered elections by noting that more people vote in suburban Cook County every four years when township offices are at stake. But there's no mention that it doesn't seem to attract Skokie voters. How many people run to their polling place because the ballot features the allure of the Niles Township Board race? 

Skokie is good at providing services, but services aren't everything. 

For instance: Skokie has more affordable housing than its neighbors, but not for long. The main reason for the current affordability seems to be that some of the housing stock is old, and it just isn't worth as much. The bad news: As it's replaced, it tends to be much more expensive because unlike many neighbors, the village has never passed an ordinance requiring it happen any other way. In fact, there's considerable evidence that Skokie government is purposely running up the cost of housing by seeking luxury.

There's no indication that anything will prevent Skokie – a traditional first stop for new suburbanites – from pricing itself out of the reach of many young families.

The village is behind on sustainability, too. Fees are creeping up. Expect higher taxes to support Old Orchard while downtown Skokie languishes. 

It sounds like a municipality that has lost some of its verve. But the trains run on time.

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