Plainfield Township Park District Candidate Removed From Ballot

PLAINFIELD, IL — A Plainfield Township Park District candidate will be omitted from the ballot after an objection to her petition was sustained by the Will County Officers Electoral Board.

The objection, by Mohammed F. Faheem, of Plainfield, claimed that the candidate petition packet filed by Pamela A. Covington did not have page numbers, some signatures were illegible and others were not valid. According to state law, the number of signatures a candidate running for park district commissioner collects should be equivalent to at least 2 percent of the votes cast during the last election for a commissioner.

In this case, that number is 86. Even though Covington's petition had 89 signatures, 16 of them were not considered. Fourteen of those were from people who are not registered voters in the district and two were from people whose signatures did not match the ones in the voter registration file. This brought the number of valid signatures down to 73.

On the basis of these objections, the Will County Clerk's Office ordered the district to not print his name on the ballot for the April 6 election.