Council passes ordinance Monday directing Cook County Clerk’s office to implement the new system

By Bob Seidenberg

Evanston City Council members voted 8-1 Monday in support of an ordinance, declaring the city’s intention to establish a new Ranked-Choice voting  to elect certain city offices in the April 2025 election despite  insistence from the Cook County Clerk’s office that the system isn’t available.

Evanston voters overwhelmingly approved a referendum on the ballot in the November 2022 election, asking voters whether they favored the city moving to a ranked-choice voting system starting with the April 2025 consolidated election.

The system would allow voters to rank candidates from highest to lowest preference instead of voting for a single candidate. Evanston was the first municipality in Illinois to pass the measure.

A number of groups had backed the change, which was first brought forward Reform for Illinois, a non-partisan research and advocacy group. Ninth Ward Council member Juan Geracaris had sponsored the issue at the council level.

 Council member Devon Reid, 8th, who was the city’s top elected official in his former role as city clerk, had warned then, and continued to at Monday’s meeting, that the city had failed to take steps necessary for the issue to appear on the 2025 municipal ballot.

At Monday night’s meeting, Reid asked Corporation Counsel Alexandra Ruggie directly “why are we passing this ordinance?”

Ruggie said her answer was the same as before, “that this helps clarify and establish within the (City) Code and instructs the County Clerk to implement ranked-choice voting.”

Council member Clare Kelly, 1st, also asked Mayor Daniel Biss, why he’s “spearheaded” the move. Biss acknowledged that his preference would have been a collaboration with the Cook County Clerk’s office.

That collaboration “has been difficult for a variety of reasons, some related to health (the death of County Clerk Karen Yarbrough),” he said. Now, “we’re running into a potential problem, not because the initial referendum was vague, but because a bunch of time has been frittered away,” he said, “and in an effort to kind of prompt the kind of now pretty efficient work that would be required implementation (that) goes smoothly in April, I’m asking us to pass something sensible…to hopefully spur that motion on the part of the County Clerk’s office.”

Cook County Clerk’s Office: Evanston would need to address the issue legislatively

That  office, however, last December, informed city officials in both oral and written communications that ranked-choice voting is not currently provided for under the Illinois Election Code, the office has maintained, and that “there is no voting system that exists that is certified by the Illinois State Board of Elections  that would enable the Cook County Clerk’s Office to conduct ranked-choice voting.”

”The implementation of ranked-choice voting would require statutory changes to the state’s existing election code, a matter Evanston would need to address in the legislative arena in order to move forward,” the Clerk’s office has stated.

Minutes from an April 8 Ranked-Choice Voting Systems Task Force meeting — at which Evanston City Clerk Stephanie Mendoza was among those attending — indicated officials were far away from having a system ready.

In the minutes, Ed Michalowski, the Deputy Clerk of the Cook County Clerk’s Election Unit, asks the group whether “there is any system currently certified in the State for ranked-choice voting?”

Brian Pryor, who is the Senior Policy Advisor to the Illinois State Board of Elections, responds “to my understanding and as of today, no.’”

Sen. Laura Murphy (D-Des Plaines), the co-chair of the group, is quoted as saying, “in my opinion, yes, there would need to be legislative change for any changes to the Illinois Election Code.”

Referendum contained fatal deficiencies: Reid maintained

 Reid, though, released a letter he had sent earlier in the process to Yarbrough and others back in February, declaring early on that the referendum the city presented to voters was “unfortunately marred by several legally fatal deficiencies.”

They included the proposal’s “Non-Self-Executing Nature,” he charged.

“The language of the RCV referendum lacks the necessary specificity required under Illinois law, as emphasized by the Illinois Supreme Court in the case Leck v. Michaelson. Evanston’s RCV referendum fails to provide a complete procedural framework for its implementation,” he wrote.
“ Exactly as the referendum in the Leck case “had to be interpreted, supplemented and modified in order to be implemented, so too does Evanston’s RCV,” he wrote. “This absence of a self-executing mechanism leaves essential details to be determined post-approval, a fatal issue reaffirmed time and time again by Illinois courts. Such vagueness and incompleteness would require the Cook County Clerk to “at some later date determine the procedures” for effective implementation of Evanston’s RCV system.”