Clean Politics and Public Service

I will work to clean up Illinois politics and to confront the ubiquitous and defeatist viewpoint that, in Chicago, corruption is a quaint part of our culture. I believe that we need to start with cleaning up our elections and increasing citizen participation.

The current system permits and encourages elected officials to use the power of their job to keep their job or transfer it to family members or friends. The only way to ensure that politicians work for the people rather than for themselves is to reform the way we finance and conduct our elections.

Electoral Reform

I support:

• Implementing a blanket primary system rather than the open primary we currently have to promote greater voter flexibility.
• Reforming the process by which we draw district lines to prevent partisan gerrymandering that favors incumbents and the established monied parties.
• Lowering ballot-access signature requirements and other restrictions that limit additional party and independent candidate participation in our elections.
• The institution of Instant Runoff Voting.
• Eliminating many of the bureaucratic hurdles to voter registration and electoral participation-including placing the burden of 100% voter registration on the state, expanding early voting, and creating a statewide election holiday.

Campaign Finance Reform
The Illinois Green Party and all of its candidates refuse corporate campaign contributions.

The current structure in Illinois and the US is essentially a legalized form of bribery. Corporations give millions of dollars each year to political candidates, and it is absurd to think that they would do so if they weren't getting anything in return. Meanwhile, individuals and citizen groups have less and less say and influence over elected officials. Most people think that the solutions to our everyday problems are complex. However, our system of campaign contributions inherently corrupts the process, meaning good, common sense ideas and solutions have nowhere to go when they do exist.

To clean up politics in Illinois, we need to:

• Support current proposals that would ban campaign contributions from any company or individual contracted by the state.
• Work toward a cap on campaign contributions that would at least match the federal level of $2300. An even smaller cap would be ideal, as candidates running for state office should not need to raise as much money as federal candidates. Very few politicians could be bought and sold by an individual with a contribution cap of $500.
• Work toward a complete ban of corporate campaign contributions in the state of Illinois.
• Work toward a fully publicly funded system of campaigning. Candidates would receive equal allotments of airtime on radio and television networks, assets ultimately owned by the government. Qualified candidates would receive a set amount of money with which to campaign, and would be barred from raising any other money. Partial and full systems of publicly financed campaigns exist across the US.