Democrats looking for another clean sweep of Cook County races

The down-ballot races for Cook County clerk and Circuit Court clerk could spell big changes to the county’s administrative hinterlands. Each office is known either for its paper pushing, its reputation for political patronage hiring, or some combination of both.

In the court clerk race, three candidates are vying to become the next head of the massive office that serves as the records manager for one of the largest court systems in the nation. The winner will succeed outgoing Clerk Iris Martinez, who lost in the Democratic primary in March.

Three candidates are also facing off in the race for county clerk, an office that  manages suburban elections, legislative records for the Cook County Board and oversees all of the county’s birth, death, marriage, ethics and property records. The clerk’s race is an unexpected special election for only a two-year term, following the death earlier this year of Clerk Karen Yarbrough.

Even farther down the ballot, voters will have their say for two seats on the Cook County Board serving the South and West sides that are part of special elections, and whether they should reelect longtime Board of Review Commissioner Larry Rogers, who is facing a Libertarian candidate.

Democrats currently hold all those spots. And the Cook County Democratic Party is so confident about its candidates’ prospects of keeping them that rather than knocking on doors in Chicago and the suburbs or stuffing mailboxes with local candidates’ pamphlets, many party officials — and even some candidates on the ballot themselves — are spending time in Wisconsin or Michigan instead, helping turn out swing state voters for Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential bid. The party still will be sending out its traditional mailers featuring endorsed candidates, party officials said, but not much else.

Summing up party leaders’ view of Republican and Libertarian candidates’ chances, Jacob Kaplan, the Cook County Democratic Party’s executive director, said that “besides (Republican state’s attorney candidate) Bob Fioretti, I couldn’t even tell you the names” of the people running for county clerk and circuit court clerk.

Their insouciance extends to fundraising: The party has been so self-assured recently of its ability to hold onto its offices in presidential elections, party leaders typically don’t feel the need to beef up their campaign coffers for the final stretch. This year, the party had just $286,000 on hand in its campaign fund at the end of September, according to state records. Four years ago, it was $263,000, records showed, and the party won all the countywide offices.

The coffers are likely to be refreshed after a fundraiser held last week that was headlined by President Joe Biden’s senior adviser, Tom Perez.

Sean Morrison, the lone Republican commissioner on the Cook County Board and chair of the Cook County GOP, acknowledged the odds are steep, estimating there are likely between 200,000 and 300,000 more Democrats than Republicans who will be voting in Cook County. In 2020, just over 558,000 people voted for Republican President Donald Trump, while about 1.7 million voted for Biden.

But the Democrats’ inaction might help, Morrison suggested. He said if both Democratic and Republican candidates are relative unknowns, some folks might opt for a Republican.

“Do I think (former President Trump will) outperform what he did in 2020? I do. Don’t know how that translates to countywides,” Morrison said. “If there are enough people that say, ‘I’m going to vote for Trump,’ are they going to click down the ballot for Fioretti, Lupe, the Water Rec District folks, a couple judges? Hard to say.”

Circuit Court clerk

The Cook County Circuit Court clerk is the main administrator for the nation’s second-largest unified court system, with about 1,400 employees. Though being court clerk is a seemingly rote role, there are significant consequences if it is run poorly: Delays or errors in processing court documents could affect child support or eviction proceedings, keep innocent people in prison longer or mean details that should be sealed are instead improperly released.

Democrat Mariyana Spyropoulos, an attorney who currently sits on the board of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, won the party’s endorsement and prevailed in the March primary over one-term incumbent Martinez. Tapping her family’s wealth to largely self-fund that race, Spyropoulos fetched roughly two-thirds of the vote.

Martinez campaigned four years ago as a scrappy underdog not beholden to the party and promised to reform the office after years of poor management and corruption under longtime court Clerk Dorothy Brown. Though Martinez touted improvements, such as digitizing paper records and creating a new call center to help litigants manage the court system, she was hurt by allegations of mixing politics with government business and errors with felony records and juvenile offender data. Though the county Democratic Party typically lines up to support incumbents for primaries, the deliberations about who the party would endorse were contentious. Spyropoulos eventually won the county party’s backing.

She now faces Chicago police Officer Lupe Aguirre, a Republican, and Libertarian Michael Murphy.

During the primary, Spyropoulos pledged to put the office under the oversight of the county’s independent inspector general, rather than a clerk-appointed watchdog. She also promised to work to change state law to make certain data subject to the Freedom of Information Act and to regularly release data on office spending and statistics about cases in the system. Both will take time, she said in an interview this month.

Since winning the primary, Spyropoulos has been meeting with presiding judges to get their input on needed office changes and considering potential leadership hires, including her head of operations, chief of staff, legal counsel, interim inspector general and head of finance, who will audit how the office is handling fee collections. She has also put together an advisory group around the pillars of her campaign: ethics, transparency and technology.

Aguirre was the county GOP’s nominee in 2022 when he ran for Cook County sheriff and lost against longtime incumbent Tom Dart, a Democrat. Aguirre also ran as a Democrat for the Cook County Board in 2018.

Murphy, who works in information technology, moved to Chicago in 2021 and has campaigned on transparency. Touting himself on his website as “an outsider who will not keep up the status quo of bad decision-making” from the last two court clerks, he also pledged to make the office subject to FOIA.

Cook County clerk

Following Yarbrough’s death this spring, county Democrats tapped first-term County Board member Monica Gordon from a group of 15 hopefuls to represent them in the special election on this year’s ballot. Among Gordon’s strongest selling points, party members said, was strong backing from labor unions.

Though Yarbrough was beloved by many in the party, the office under her was accused of stonewalling reforms meant to root out patronage and political favoritism. The Tribune previously reported Yarbrough gave jobs to her niece, a congressman’s nephew, a former Illinois House colleague, a state representative’s son, a state senator’s sister and campaign workers from her political home base in Maywood and Proviso Township.

When it comes to hiring relatives, Gordon said, “That’s not my thing to do, I will not do that, but I will hire the best people. I’m looking for the best people. I’m not connected in any way to people who are currently there, so if they’re not the best at what they do, I do not want to keep them.”

Among Gordon’s top priorities for the office: maintain and improve election integrity, make some vital records available for purchase online, and introduce AI as a tool “to free up tasks for employees, not replace employees.”

Gordon was elected to the County Board’s 5th District in 2022. Before that, she was executive director of the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus foundation, the caucus’s fundraising arm. She also was a trustee at Prairie State College and the head of government relations at Chicago State University.

Republican nominee Michelle Pennington said rooting out nepotism, bringing back employees who were working from home and cleaning the voter rolls would be her top priorities.

“This is simply taking people that are already deceased off the voter rolls, taking people that have moved off the voter rolls, giving people confidence that only citizens, only people who are supposed to vote in those elections, can vote in those elections,” Pennington said.

The clerk’s office already “checks and confirms the deaths of registered voters and removes those names from the voter database on an ongoing basis,” spokeswoman Sally Daly told the Tribune. The process begins either with a surviving family member or spouse alerting the office, or receipt of a provided list of the dead from the Illinois State Board of Elections, she said.

“Our elections staff then works to determine if the death is recorded in the Illinois Vital Records System to obtain an official death record. That death record is then checked in the clerk’s voter database and if there is a name match, we then confirm address, date of birth and Social Security number. If all identifying factors are confirmed, the voter is removed from the database,” Daly said.

A Texas native who moved to Chicago in her 20s, Pennington invests in and manages rental properties, a business she would give up if elected. She got involved with the Cook County GOP “more and more,” in recent years because “the city I love is trending in the wrong direction.”

“One party has been in charge of Cook County for so long, we’re ready for change,” Pennington said, noting the office is administrative — not ideological. Voters can look at the “individuals running and not necessarily their party” and split the ticket if they want. “We go into the private booth so you can make your decision in private, you don’t have to let anybody know how you’re voting.”

Though she hasn’t met Gordon, Pennington said, “I don’t have specific critiques except for the fact that she’s part of the political machine. I think a vote for her is a vote for the same old same old.”

The Libertarian candidate running for clerk is Christopher Laurent. A paralegal and Navy veteran, according to his website, Laurent said he would “build on the great strides” Yarbrough took to modernize the office, including digitizing records to “reduce the need for physical visits to the office and cutting down on wait times,” while minimizing “waste and redundancy” by renegotiating contracts and cutting unnecessary expenses.

County Board and Board of Review

Board of Review Commissioner Larry Rogers, fresh off a heated primary proxy battle with Assessor Fritz Kaegi, is wrapping up his 20th year on the board responsible for hearing appeals of property tax assessments from Kaegi’s office. As Rogers seeks another term, his sole opponent is Libertarian Nico Tsatsoulis. Both Rogers and Tsatsoulis consider themselves anti-Kaegi — Tsatsoulis ran for assessor in 2022 but lost to Kaegi by 54 percentage points.

The Board of Review and Kaegi have long disagreed on what factors to use in calculating the value of property, especially commercial properties. Kaegi has often said the Board of Review’s tweaks to his office’s valuations have resulted in the tax burden shifting back onto homeowners. Rogers has been one of the most vociferous defenders of the board’s standards and one of the most vocal critics of Kaegi’s leadership.

In an interview with the Tribune Editorial Board, Rogers opened the door to taking on Kaegi in the 2026 elections, either by funding an opponent or running himself.

“I’m ready to make sure he doesn’t win another elected office,” he said of Kaegi.

Rogers was able to fend off a primary challenge in March from Kaegi-backed Larecia Tucker in large part because Rogers self-funded his campaign. In addition to his board position, he is an attorney with the firm Power Rogers LLP.

Also on the ballot: special elections to fill two seats on the Cook County Board, including Mayor Brandon Johnson’s old seat on the board.

Fellow Chicago Teachers Union colleague Tara Stamps was already appointed to fill the vacancy after Johnson moved to City Hall. She is running to complete the rest of his term representing the city’s West Side and western suburbs against James Humay, the Libertarian nominee who has pledged to work to cut taxes and the size of county government.

Former Ald. Michael Scott Jr. is also running unopposed in the special election to fill the late county Commissioner Dennis Deer’s seat. He was appointed to fill the vacancy through the end of the year.