In Carpensville, much ado about ... binder clips?

The electoral board system of filing objections in Kane County, or at least Carpentersville, needs to change.

The current system leaves too much room for political bias and favoritism as evidenced in the recent hearings of the Carpentersville electoral board.

There were two obvious sides: those allied with the village president and those allied with his archenemies on the board.

All 11 candidates - that's three village president hopefuls and eight trustee candidates - faced various challenges to their nominating papers. The objections ranged from the use of forged signatures to the method of binding pages together. For those considering a run in the 2011 election, know that a binder clip is considered more secure than a medium-sized paper clip.

Half of the challenges came from a well-known foe of Village President Bill Sarto. One-time village board candidate Frank Stoneham submitted objections to the petitions of Sarto and his challenger, Jim Krenz, trustee candidates Linda Ramirez-Sliwinski, Kenneth Andresen, Debra Lowen and Joseph Haimann. In the previous election, Stoneham was a staunch supporter of trustees Judith Sigwalt and Paul Humpfer.

It seemed Stoneham was avenging payback to the successful challenges levied against his nominating petition in 2007 that knocked him off the ballot. Unlike those challenges, Stoneham failed in all six attempts.

Resident Judith Gallagher, at the behest of Algonquin resident and Carpentersville business owner David Reece, filed the other half-dozen challenges. The challenges resulted in one success, the removal of Kent Baldwin, who used a medium-sized paper clip to secure his nominating petitions. I understand the need to number and bind pages together, but is a binder clip really that much more difficult to remove than a paper clip?

Since it was blatantly clear that there were two factions involved, an electoral board of three public members would have been far more efficient.

Instead, we had to endure two nights and one day of hearings, two days of cross-checking signatures and hours of bickering. If three random members were chosen, there would not have been a need for two members to recuse themselves, thus creating the need for three variations of the village's electoral board.

On one board, Sarto, Sigwalt and Village Clerk Terri Wilde presided. On another, it was local attorneys Tim O'Neil and Thomas Scherschel and Judy Sigwalt. On yet another sat Sarto, Sigwalt and O'Neil.

But since the board determined that a binder clip is sufficient for holding pages together, perhaps at the next election, a challenge to those clips will be instantly overruled.

But that's not where the binder clip saga ends.

On his blog, Sarto accused Ritter of taking village property - binder clips - and using them to bind his own petition and those of two other candidates. Were these allegations necessary? Probably not, and it seems like Sarto was grasping for straws in an effort to damage the character of Ritter, who vehemently denied using binder clips from village hall during last week's village board meeting.

Ritter maintains he had his own binder clips when he walked into village hall on Monday, Jan. 19 to turn in his nominating petition.

They say desperate times call for desperate measures and the allegations Sarto made against Ritter are about the most desperate I have seen. Really, Bill Sarto?