Early voting starts in Chicago

CHICAGO — Even though issues in the Chicago mayor's race like crime, schools and the city's budget have been eclipsed by the legal battle over Rahm Emanuel's residency, many who cast ballots Monday on the first day of early voting came with a clear message that they've heard enough.

One after another, even as they acknowledged they don't know the ins and outs of the candidates' views and how those views differ from each other, they said they feel they know enough to decide who should be the first person in more than two decades not named Richard Daley to lead the city.

"My mind was made up months ago," said Margie Harris, a 72-year-old retiree who lives in the Old Town neighborhood, after voting for Emanuel in downtown Chicago.

Voters' willingness to cast their ballots three weeks before the Feb. 22 election is, they say, tied to the background of the candidates. They feel they already know what they need to in order to choose between Emanuel, former Chicago schools president Gery Chico, former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun and City Clerk Miguel del Valle.

Jim Meece, a 43-year-old attorney, said he thinks Chico is "better for the city" in part because he never left and has been involved with city issues, particularly education, for years. In contrast, he sees Emanuel's run for mayor as "a step in his career to bigger things."

Maureen Russell, a 40-year-old city worker, looks at Emanuel's to return to Chicago and sees not a calculated career move, but a heartfelt decision.

"He came back to run for mayor," she said. "I like that."

Harris liked that Emanuel left in the first place and felt it says something about him that President Barack Obama selected him to serve as White House chief of staff.

"He's got it up here," she said. "He went to Washington with Obama."

That resume impressed the Chicago Sun-Times, too. On Monday, the paper endorsed Emanuel's candidacy, saying that his time in the Obama administration, as a congressman, a national Democratic Party leader and an adviser to President Bill Clinton demonstrated that he "gets big things done."

But one voter wondered if all that added up to someone who will ride roughshod over the City Council as he said Daley did for so many years.

"The city is supposed to be a weak mayor government and I prefer to have more participation from the aldermen," said Torrick Ward, a 39-year-old attorney. He said he voted for Braun, in part because he thinks she would be better at working with aldermen.

Ward also suggested that three more weeks was not going to get him any closer to understanding what any of the candidates would really do if elected.

"What they say doesn't have much relevance for when they get on the fifth floor," he said, referring to the location of the mayor's office in City Hall. "What they say is not very realistic."

Russell, though, said the candidates can still get into trouble with voters — herself included — who may have to vote again in April if none of the candidates receive more than 50 percent of the vote on Feb. 22.

She said that already happened when Braun, responding to criticism from another candidate, Patricia Van Pelt-Watkins, by pointing out that Van Pelt-Watkins' had once struggled with illegal drugs.

"It hurt her, it was very immature," Russell said.

Election officials predicted a strong turnout for the first day of early voting. Jim Allen, a spokesman for the city's elections board, said that between the growing comfort people have with early voting and the fact that Daley is not running, turnout "is going to be way up from four years ago."