There will be a contested school board race in Wheaton and Warrenville after all, despite efforts to knock four of nine candidates off the Nov. 4 ballot.
A three-member panel ruled Thursday night on the fourth and final challenge of candidates’ petitions, removing incumbent Kenneth Knicker from the ballot. The panel removed Knicker because he did not number the pages of his petitions and falsely attested that he had personally circulated the petitions. Five candidates remain on the ballot.
The vote by the Education Officers Electoral Board on the Knicker challenge is the latest battle in the escalating war in Wheaton-Warrenville Unit School District 200 between some board members and the administration on one side and disenchanted citizens in the community on the other.
The conflict stems from last March’s unsuccessful bond-issue referendum question.
The struggle has partisan political overtones because two of the candidates are Republican committeemen in Milton Township, which includes Wheaton and Glen Ellyn. So is one of the residents who filed challenges against two hopefuls who were kicked off the ballot.
Voters will select four members each for four-year terms and one member for a two-year term.
Robert Davis and Knicker, both incumbents, filed for four-year terms, as did James Flickinger, Dawn Earl, Andrew Johnson and Donald Shaner.
James Boepple, Thomas Dymit and Alan Bolds filed for the one two-year term.
Lawrence Gage, a district resident, challenged the petitions of Boepple and Dymit. Last week, the three-member panel kicked both off the ballot, ruling that Boepple had only 49 acceptable signatures and Dymit had 47. Fifty valid signatures are required for a candidate to qualify for the ballot.
Now Bolds is the only candidate left on the ballot for the one two-year term.
Flickinger, Bolds and Gage all are Republican committeemen in Milton Township.
“It’s legal, but it smells,” said Dymit, after the board removed his name.
Joseph Mahady challenged the candidacies of Davis and Knicker, maintaining his motivation is “to preserve the democratic process” by ensuring that only legally qualified candidates appear on the ballot.
Mahady attacked the Davis petitions on three levels. Davis submitted 60 names.
The board agreed with Mahady during a Monday hearing that 10 signatures do not meet legal requirements because of various irregularities, including signatures from people not registered to vote at the address listed and signatures that were not witnessed by the purported circulator of the petition.
Another allegation was that Davis failed to circle words saying he was running for a full four-year term on petitions until after they were signed. Also, Mahady contended, Davis committed perjury by claiming on four petition pages that he was the circulator when in fact he was not.
Davis admitted both of those errors, but he insisted that he had the required 50 valid signatures and said he should not be thrown off. “These technical mistakes are truly harmless,” he said.
The board agreed and allowed his name to remain.
On Thursday, Mahady, with his attorney, Keri-Lyn Krafthefer, arguing his objections, tried to convince the board that Knicker’s petitions had various irregularities that dropped the number of valid signatures below the 50 minimum.
One observer of the hearing challenges has been Shaner, neither an incumbent nor a Republican committeeman.
At one point, it appeared rulings by the panel headed by Patrick Bond, attorney for the DuPage County Election Commission, might leave on the ballot an uncontested race of four candidates for four four-year terms and one candidate for the one two-year term.
“I don’t want to get on the board that way,” Shaner said.
But now, there will be a school board contest in Wheaton and Warrenville for the four-year terms. A write-in campaign by others is legally possible.
The die for a bitter race was cast last March when Flickinger and Earl charged that the school board and administration lied about the actual annual property tax cost for a bond issue.
