Two from Chicago

Mixing Election Oversight and Professional Contracts

According to an Illinois Business Times article on April 5, the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners is chaired by an attorney whose law firm has received presumably no-bid contracts to lobby for city agencies, that is, contracts from the administration whose mayor and alders were running for re-election. In a close race, the chair could affect whether the mayor or his allies were elected or required to face a runoff.

Chicago has a system to independently name members of the election board. This meant that the chair was not appointed by the mayor or the council, but by the county circuit court. However, the board's rules do not prohibit its members entering into city contracts, even though the contracts create a special relationship with the mayor and council.

A few things complicate this situation. One is that the chair officially works for the county court, so that even though he oversees city elections, he has no legal relationship with the city. Therefore, from the county's point of view, contractual relationships with the city do not constitute a conflict of interest (see the county ethics board's advisory opinion). Also, since the contracts are for lobbying, the county ethics board treated the matter as a lobbying issue rather than a contractual issue, finding that as long as there is no lobbying of the county, there is no ethics violation.

This is a perfect example of a situation that is very difficult for an ethics code to anticipate. An ethics advisor, therefore, should (if not prohibited from doing so) treat the ethics code's provisions as minimum requirements and find that, although there would be no legal violation, it would be inappropriate and harmful for an election board chair to seek or accept any contract or otherwise form a special relationship with any official or administration under the jurisdiction of his board.

Chicago Election Funding
An April 1 report from Illinois PIRG Education Fund found that, in February's election in Chicago, "candidates with a fundraising advantage won a majority or plurality 93 percent of the time," and that in 2014 "only 11 percent of money contributed came from donors giving less than $150. This percentage will almost certainly go down once we have complete reporting for 2015 because a significant number of large contributions come in close to the municipal and runoff elections."

Since most large contributions come from those seeking special benefits from city officials ("restricted sources"), this means that contractors, developers, licensees, grantees, and other restricted sources were funding the victors in the municipal election (the report does not include independent spending). This creates an appearance that every decision in favor of restricted sources will have been influenced by campaign contributions and/or that Chicago still has a strong pay-to-play political culture.

Illinois PIRG and other local good government organizations are calling for what they call a "small donor matching system" for public funding of local elections.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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