Report: Illinois GOP sends Armed Thugs to Libertarians Homes

Photo Credit: DuPageLibertarians.org

Illinois Republicans went way too far in their desperate attempt to keep the Illinois Libertarian Party off the November ballot. Imagine your doorbell rings and two giant, threatening thugs with guns tell you you’ve committed a crime by signing the Libertarian Party’s ballot access petition. They then force you against your will to sign a document recanting your original petition signature. It happened across Illinois and it’s a Class 4 felony. Illinois Republicans may go to prison. And they may just lose what was going to be a landslide General Election over it.

Is democracy dead in Illinois?

It’s bad enough that in Illinois, Republican and Democratic Party Congressional candidates need to submit only 300 and 500 petition signatures respectively to appear on the ballot. Independents, Libertarians, Greens and all others running for the same office must submit an average of 20,000 signatures. This election, opposition parties needed to submit 25,000 valid signatures to get their candidate slates on the November ballot.

The Libertarians, Greens and Constitution Party all did. The Republicans kicked the Constitution Party off the coming ballot. The Democrats, in the form of the elected Cook County Recorder of Deeds, kicked the Greens off. But having collected and submitted 42,986 signatures, the Illinois Libertarians made it nearly impossible for state Republicans to knock them off. That’s why they’ve been sending armed thugs with guns to the homes of those who signed the LP’s petitions, terrorizing them into signing additional documents recanting their original signature.

Over the past two weeks, election officials, Republican Party operatives, and Libertarian Party supporters have been engaged in an effort to analyze every one of the LP’s 43k signatures, with the GOP challenging every signature they could and the LP’s volunteers steadfastly defending their validity. By the end of the process last week, the Republicans officially challenged 23,667 Libertarian signatures. But BOE officials only agreed with 12,789 of those challenges, leaving the Illinois Libertarians with 30,197 – 5,197 more than the 25k needed. The Libertarians had won their right to participate in the coming 2014 General Election, or so they thought.