Yesterday I dutifully went to vote at my assigned polling place, cheat sheet provided by the ward Democratic organization in hand. It showed me exactly how not to vote.
Actually I did vote for one of the approved candidates: Spyropoulous for Clerk of the Circuit Court. Although I recognize that most of the party’s opposition to Martinez was because she had not been a “good soldier”, I still think there
About 20% of registered Chicago voters voted in the primaries all told. That includes in-person voting yesterday, early voting, and vote-by-mail, something like 300,000 in all of Chicago’s 1.7 million voters. One individual characterized the turnout as “shockingly low”. I don’t believe that the low turnout was due to disinterest but to despair. It really didn’t make any difference how we voted.
You can see details of the results here, provided by ABC 7 Chicago.
Of greatest interest to me was the race to succeed outgoing Cook County States Attorney, the execrable Kim Foxx. It’s a close race. To the best of my ability to determine at no time did Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle’s hand-picked candidate, party apparatchik Clayton Harris, III lead but it’s tight, Burke 51%-Harris 49%, a difference of about 10,000 votes. The outcome will depend on votes mailed in which will trickle in over the next several days. If Harris wins based on mail-in votes, I think we should all smell a rat.
The mayor’s real estate transfer tax referendum appears to be going down to defeat 54%-46% but that, too, is too close to tell. The measure provided for a graduated real estate transfer tax with properties of values below $1 million taxed at .6%, $1 million taxed at 2%, and $1.5 million or greater taxed at 3%. Had the measure been more narrowly tailored, applying only to single family dwellings and adjusted for inflation I might have voted for it. It isn’t what the mayor characterized it as, a “mansion tax”. It doesn’t take much of an apartment building to have a valuation of $1 million or more. As such it’s mostly a commercial property tax. Furthermore, “bracket creep” should not provide an automatic tax increase.
Heh.
I think I moved from Chicago now some 7-8 years ago. I find the place unrecognizable, reading your commentary, and talking to friends still stuck there. I’m saddened. In the interim, I’ve been in FL, SC, and now No. GA, in the mountains. Probably for the foreseeable future. (about a mile south of the far western NC border) Its such a different world in the SE. A better world, IMHO.
I was doing some reading recently. One of my favorite philosophers: Drew. As he observed. Chicago? Philly? Baltimore? NY? SanFran?? You are all totally fucked.