As the coronavirus pandemic overshadowed this week’s primary election in Illinois, depressing turnout and delivering the state’s delegates to Joe Biden, Cook County voters also had a choice to make about their next clerk of the Circuit Court.
The clerk of the Circuit Court is an unfamiliar office for many voters. As a record-keeping body, its role is essential but mostly invisible unless one works in the courts or has to deal with a case. This obscurity, and the size of the staff (currently some 1,400 workers), has historically allowed it to be a bastion for patronage jobs. Indeed the latest scandals under Brown involved accusations of jobs exchanged for campaign donations. Despite these salacious scandals, and ones involving Brown’s incompetence in her official capacity, the office has stayed off people’s radars and out of the news lately. Political observers interviewed for this story pointed out that this was a particularly difficult year to educate voters about this part of the ballot, as the election was dominated by the presidential contest and the hotly contested Cook County state’s attorney’s race.
Ramirez-Rosa added that even his own ward organization chose to stump for Bernie Sanders, Kim Foxx, and progressive state house candidate Nidia Carranza. “As a ward organization we needed to hunker down and focus on the races we really felt needed our help,” he said. “That’s one of the realities of campaigning. You probably have a voter at the door for maybe five or ten minutes at the most, so how do you have a meaningful conversation with them about races? You generally keep it to three . . . While people have been upset about corruption in Dorothy Brown’s office, I think people were more panicked about the prospect of losing Kim Foxx.”
