Willie Wilson’s campaign seeks to knock Mayor Johnson off ballot with petition challenges

Mayor Brandon Johnson already faces a rocky road to reelection, with a 30% approval rating, only $400,000 in his campaign war chest and a fractured coalition of progressive unions that helped put him in office.

Now the embattled incumbent also must survive a potentially costly and time-consuming petition challenge seeking to disqualify him for failing to file the 12,500 valid signatures needed to get on the ballot. When he filed, he submitted 33,000 signatures.

Former state Sen. Rickey Hendon is leading the drive to knock Johnson off the ballot on behalf of Willie Wilson, the millionaire businessman mounting his fourth mayoral campaign. Hendon predicted Johnson would become the first incumbent Chicago mayor to be disqualified from the ballot.

“We found a lot of problems — way too many to describe. The lawyers will hash it out, but I doubt very seriously that he has any chance of making it” on the ballot, Hendon told the Chicago Sun-Times. “I was shocked. I’ve never seen such a poorly put together filing in my life. It was the absolutely worst. I blame his campaign staff. The mayor should fire somebody. Heads should roll. The mayor trusted the wrong people.”

Hendon said he’s had a team of 20 people scrutinizing Johnson’s petitions for the last 10 days.

“They have circulator problems. They have photocopy problems with thousands of signatures photocopied. They have all kinds of issues that will bring them under the 12,500 by a lot,” Hendon said. “There were petitions that didn’t belong to his campaign. Melissa Conyears-Ervin for treasurer was in there. ... There were some pages where people obviously wrote multiple names. Missing addresses. People who live outside Chicago."

Johnson’s political director, Christian Perry, said he is confident the mayor will survive the challenge.

But even if his name does appear on the ballot, the challenge will strain Johnson's campaign coffers.

If the Wilson campaign’s challenge takes the mayor under the required 12,500 signatures, Johnson could be forced to get affidavits from enough of the people associated with those challenged signatures to meet the mandatory minimum to qualify.

Veteran political consultant Frank Calabrese mounted the 2019 petition challenge that knocked mayoral candidate Dorothy Brown off the ballot. Brown had filed roughly 25,000 signatures. Without knowing the details of Hendon’s challenge, Calabrese said he would be surprised if the Wilson campaign succeeded in getting Johnson knocked off the ballot.

The adjudication of challenges will continue until Dec. 17, when the final mayoral ballot is certified.

“Assuming that Johnson was telling truth when he said he was filing 33,000 signatures, it’s more likely than not that he stays on the ballot unless his petitions are just atrocious,” Calabrese said. "It’s much more likely that he’s gonna be on the ballot than off the ballot if he actually filed 33,000 signatures because he filed 2½ times the requirement. So that means nearly two-thirds would have to be bad.”

Incumbent mayors traditionally file a wheelbarrow full of nominating petitions on the first day of filing to qualify for the lottery to be the first name on the ballot. Johnson waited until the Friday before the Monday deadline, and then surprised political observers by filing what he said were 33,000 signatures.

That’s a relatively low number for an incumbent mayor. Richard M. Daley, Chicago’s longest-serving mayor, once filed more than 100,000 signatures, with help from the once-powerful Democratic ward organizations filled with city workers.

But Daley also is the last incumbent to have his petitions challenged. To qualify for the 2007 ballot, Daley filed just 24,100 signatures, and his petitions were challenged, unsuccessfully, by rival candidate William "Dock" Walls.

Veteran political operative Victor Reyes, advising newcomer Lisa Nee’s mayoral campaign, traced Johnson’s alleged petition troubles to three factors — all related to the Chicago Teachers Union.

They are: the civil war between CTU and SEIU that prompted two SEIU locals to endorse Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias; the decision by rank-and-file teachers to reject a dues increase, and the CTU's preoccupation with elected school board races.

“If they don’t have SEIU, who are probably as politically active as any union out there, who knows? He may have lost a lot of his high-end circulating folks and run into some problems,” Reyes said.

Giannoulias has a $19.3 million campaign war chest that makes him the presumed front-runner in the 16-candidate field.

His campaign filed a petition challenge against attorney William J. Quinlan. That turns the tables on Quinlan, who has promised to appeal a lawsuit dismissed by a circuit judge seeking to prevent Giannoulias, U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley and Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas from simultaneously running for mayor while also seeking reelection to their current offices.

"I'm running for one job — mayor of Chicago," Quinlan said Monday. "They should have to pick one too."

Objections were also filed to the nominating petitions submitted by outgoing Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza, lobbyist John Kelly, Giannoulias, Pappas, Quigley, Zoey Ma, Nee, Jesse Maronto, Danielle Carter-Walters and John Kitover.

Kelly challenged Mendoza's petitions, which is no surprise since they're both going after the same conservative voters on the Northwest and Southwest sides. Kelly's residency is also being challenged. Although he recently built a $4.4 million compound in suburban Homer Glen where he goes on weekends, Kelly said a Gold Coast condominium he bought 2½ years before the election has been his legal residence since October 2024.

Contributing: Misha Manjuran Oberoi