Update: The Town of Normal can not pay staff to review the signatures, that would be electioneering and illegal!
Close to 2200 signatures will be submitted to the Town of Normal this afternoon. Signing the petition only gets a Yes or No question on the November ballot.
Next the real fun starts! Let’s see who is going to stop at nothing to keep voters from choosing their own government.
The fight has already started. The Town Clerk gets to decide the date where the number of registered voters is derived. The Town is threatening to use a two year old number insteads of the current number. Registered voters two years ago was around 3500 higher than now.
That’s hilarious since those 3500 people aren’t here to sign petitions!
I doubt a court would side with them when the voters no longer exist. Remember Normal is a college town? Not everybody stays where they registered two years ago.
Regardless of the number I’m told the group that collected signatures have enough verified registered voters to survive a challenge.
How much time will Normal staff waste trying to eliminate signatures? The citizens of Normal should email their elected At-Large Trustees and tell them to direct their employee Pam Reece to stop wasting time. Address:
https://www.normalil.gov/FormCenter/General-Forms-5-5/Contacting-the-Mayor-and-Town-Council-40-40
(Your email will prove why Districts are needed)
See this website if you have questions: https://betternormal-il.com/
Even if all of these 3,500 people signed the petition, their signatures would not count because they are not registered voters in Normal, but Normal wants to use them. I was told Normal would “pull out all the stops” to stop this.
I predict some stooge will be stood up by Pam Reece and Kris Koos to object to this. Of course, taxpayers will flip the bill for town staff to do all research and scour the petitions. Pam and Kris’s worst nightmare is having to listen to the residents.
I would love to have been a fly on the King and Queen’s wall today.
Pam did look annoyed, but no worse than when Stan makes a particularly good point at a council meeting. I expect we have similar guesses as to what was said behind the scenes…
Pop a big bowel of popcorn, grab an ice cold beer and enjoy the show. I love it when Koos gets pissy.