A Tough Day for the Trib and David Orr

Over at capitolfax, Rich is asking for winners and losers from Tuesday primary election. For my money, the contest for "Biggest Election Day Loser" is a toss-up between two candidates: the Chicago Tribune editorial board and David Orr.

There’s nothing unusual about a newspaper running a few hard-hitting editorials against a politician. But the Tribune editorial board has been on a virtual crusade against John Stroger for years, hitting him harder than any politician in recent memory. Last week, the Tribsters actually reduced themselves to literally begging their readers to defeat Stroger ("Please make time Tuesday to vote for Forrest Claypool.")

Well, the Tribune’s Cook County slate went down in flames Tuesday. Not only did Stroger win (and by the way, when the all votes are actually counted, his "tiny" margin of victory might reach a more comfortable 8 or 9 points,) but a group of Stroger’s board allies who were repeatedly targeted by the Trib -- Sims, Murphy and Moreno – all won by huge margins.

Claypool was right in his concession speech when he claimed he took on a lot of powerful forces, but Claypool had an extremely powerful ally of his own in the Tribune. Stroger beat them both.

Meanwhile, David Orr should be impeached for his performance on Election Day. That may sound extreme, but think about it for a minute, the guy has only one significant job to do – run an election every two years – and he screwed it up big time.

He dismissed critics by saying some people "acted like something was wrong if they didn’t get the results by the 10 o’clock news." What’s wrong with wanting results by 10 o’clock? Orr and his partners-in-failure at the Chicago Board of Elections repeatedly offered the alibi that Cook County was the only jurisdiction in the nation to employee a two-tier voting system of touch screen and optical scan balloting. That’s not an excuse. In fact, it’s an indictment. Maybe the reason no one else in the country is doing it is because it doesn’t work.

Furthermore, here we are almost 48 hours after the polls closed and a handful of lower ballot races for judge, water reclamation district, and county board are still undecided because anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of the ballots haven’t been counted. Orr should be thanking his lucky stars that the Stroger-Claypool race and Republican gubernatorial contest weren’t closer.
If they were, there would be a lynch mob forming for him outside the County Building right now.
The poster-sized optical scan ballot will never work. It’s too large, too prone to ripping and folding, and too flimsy to feed through the scanner. Not to mention, it’s so big the entire polling place can see who you voted for. If you thought Tuesday was a disaster, just wait for November when there are nearly twice as many voters and judicial retention is on the ballot.

Again, running the election is Orr's only significant job. The Clerk’s office not being prepared for an election is the equivalent of FEMA not being ready for a hurricane.