Illinois statute 10 ILCS 5/7-43 provides that a voter who requests a party ballot in a primary is barred from appearing on the November ballot as an independent candidate or as a candidate of a different party. The statute does not require the voter be notified of this consequence. No signage at the polling place, no poll worker instruction, no language on the ballot, and no State Board of Elections guidance informs voters that casting a party ballot forfeits their right to seek office as an independent.
In March 2026 the plaintiff voted in the Illinois primary. His precinct had no contested Democratic races at the local or regional level — only statewide primaries for governor and U.S. Senate. He cast a Republican ballot — the only ballot on which his vote could meaningfully count at the legislative level. A month later, in the course of preparing to file as an independent candidate for State Representative in the November 2026 general election, he discovered that 7-43 disqualifies him.
The complaint seeks a narrow, cycle-specific remedy: enjoin enforcement of 7-43 as applied to plaintiff’s 2026 candidacy, so that his name may appear on the November ballot while the constitutional questions are litigated. This is the same category of relief the same court granted in Collazo v. Illinois State Board of Elections (Sangamon County Circuit Court, 2024).
Section 7-43 imposes a severe burden — total forfeiture of the right to appear on the ballot — on a plaintiff whose only triggering act was voting. Under the balancing test of Anderson v. Celebrezze, 460 U.S. 780 (1983), and the severe-burden standard of Burdick v. Takushi, 504 U.S. 428 (1992), that burden must be weighed against the state’s asserted interest.
The state’s traditional justification for 7-43 is the prevention of strategic “sore loser” candidacies — candidates who lose a party primary and then defect to the general as independents. That interest cannot survive scrutiny as applied to a district where only one party fields candidates. Plaintiff did not lose a primary. Plaintiff did not defect. Plaintiff voted the only competitive ballot available to him in a district that has held no contested Democratic race in six years.
The statute does not prevent manipulation of the primary process. It punishes voters for participating in the only democratic process available to them.
The State imposed forfeiture of plaintiff’s right to seek office as a consequence of his exercise of the right to vote. Nothing at the polling place, nothing on the ballot, nothing in State Board of Elections materials informed him that voting in a party primary would bar him from running as an independent.
Due process does not require the State to provide legal advice, but it does require notice when the State conditions the exercise of one constitutional right on the silent forfeiture of another. The loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, constitutes per se irreparable injury. Elrod v. Burns, 427 U.S. 347, 373 (1976).
The State may not condition the exercise of one constitutional right on the silent forfeiture of another.
Standard gerrymandering analysis treats packing and cracking as symmetric harms. This complaint argues they are qualitatively different.
When a city is cracked, its voters lose their voice at the gerrymandered level — but the city retains its mayor, city council, ward committees, party apparatus, civic organizations, church networks, and newspaper. Local democracy survives intact.
When a rural district is packed, the mapmakers extract the population centers and leave behind counties that cannot sustain competitive infrastructure at any level. The cascade: no candidates for state rep, no candidates for state senator, no candidates for county board, no committeepersons. Ninety-four of House District 89’s one hundred twenty precincts have no Democratic committeeperson. That is not apathy. It is the downstream consequence of the architecture.
The multiplier is geometric. When one population center is cracked and slivers are attached to four adjacent rural regions, the mapmaker creates five harms from a single act — the city loses its consolidated voice, and each rural region loses the adjacent competitive ecosystem that once made its incumbents earn their seats.
The same mechanism is documented in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, where mapmakers cracked Black cities and attached slivers to rural white districts. The constitutional injury is architectural, not partisan. Carroll County, Illinois and Wilcox County, Alabama are structurally identical — party labels and racial composition reversed, the architecture the same.
Section 7-43 imposes its most severe burden on voters who are already the most structurally disenfranchised. It is the final lock on a door that has already been welded shut.
The gerrymander is usually described in terms of its arithmetic: seats taken, seats given, vote share redistributed. The arithmetic is real, and it is the subject of most of the case law. But the arithmetic misses the architecture.
The cracked city retains a functioning local democracy even after its statewide voice is diluted. Its residents still have a mayor to elect, a city council to attend, a newspaper to read, party committees to join, civic organizations to sustain. The cracking harm is bounded, discrete, and partially self-correcting through local engagement.
The packed rural region retains none of that. The architecture of the packed district extracts the population centers that once anchored competitive infrastructure. What remains cannot sustain a party organization at any level. Without a party organization, there are no committeepersons. Without committeepersons, there are no candidates. Without candidates, there are no contested races. Without contested races, there is no reason for anyone to build the infrastructure that would produce candidates. The harm is cascading, total, and self-reinforcing, because the recovery mechanism was the thing the gerrymander destroyed.
The mapmaker who cracked the city created five victims, not one — but only the rural regions lost everything.
Section 7-43 is the final mechanism in this architecture. A voter in a rural packed district who has watched competitive democracy disappear at every other level has one remaining avenue: vote in the primary of the only party that fields candidates, then attempt to run as an independent in the general. Section 7-43 closes that avenue with a trigger no one is told about.
A ruling in this case does not dismantle the gerrymander. It removes one of the mechanisms that makes the gerrymander self-sealing. That is the narrow and sufficient relief the complaint seeks.
Fifty numbered paragraphs, three counts, verification page. Establishes standing, jurisdiction, and the factual record.
Download PDF →Five-section argument under Anderson-Burdick and the Illinois preliminary injunction standard. Exhibits document the operational calendar the litigation consumed.
Download PDF →A short, WHEREAS-format narrative used in outreach to allied counsel and civil rights organizations. Suitable for press circulation.
Download PDF →The argument for why the constitutional infirmity of Section 7-43 warrants permanent injunctive and declaratory relief beyond the immediate election cycle.
Download PDF →Updates the Court on the practical filing deadline created by the Memorial Day holiday, the current status of petition operations, and the Plaintiff’s intended course of action on May 22, 2026.
Download PDF →Precinct-level analysis of under-vote rates across nine Illinois House Districts using certified 2024 general election results. Documents that HD-89’s 17.49% under-vote rate is a structural pattern, not a local anomaly — affecting 64.4% of the chamber.
Download PDF →Exhibits documenting the volunteer-zone calendar are available on request. For full records from Illinois State Board of Elections Cases 107, 108, and 538 — which document the selective-enforcement pattern referenced in the complaint — contact using the information below.
| 10 ILCS 5/7-43 | Bars primary voters from filing as independent or different-party candidates in the general election — the statute challenged in this action |
| 10 ILCS 5/10-3 | Independent candidate signature requirements (5–8% of ballots cast) |
| 10 ILCS 5/10-4 | Circulation period (90 days before last filing day) |
| 10 ILCS 5/10-6 | Independent candidate filing period (169–162 days before general election) |
| 10 ILCS 5/7-61 | Vacancy in nomination (slating) — closed by P.A. 103-0586 for 2026 |
| 10 ILCS 5/8-8 | Certificate of Deletions — the requirement incumbents violated in SBE Cases 107 and 108 |
| 735 ILCS 5/2-701 | Declaratory judgments — jurisdictional basis |
| 735 ILCS 5/11-101 | TRO without notice where irreparable harm is imminent |
| P.A. 103-0586 | Anti-slating law (signed May 3, 2024; in full effect for 2026) |
| Collazo v. ISBE (2024) | Sangamon County Circuit Court — direct precedent for cycle-specific ballot access injunction; Perlman order from Illinois Supreme Court left it in place |
| Anderson v. Celebrezze (1983) | 460 U.S. 780 — balancing test for ballot access restrictions |
| Burdick v. Takushi (1992) | 504 U.S. 428 — severe-burden standard requires narrow tailoring to compelling interest |
| Williams v. Rhodes (1968) | 393 U.S. 23 — “competition in ideas and governmental policies is at the core of our electoral process” |
| Elrod v. Burns (1976) | 427 U.S. 347 — loss of First Amendment freedoms constitutes per se irreparable injury |
| Allen v. Milligan (2023) | 599 U.S. 1 — pack-and-crack mechanism in racial redistricting context |
| Abbott v. LULAC (2025) | 607 U.S. ___ — Texas redistricting, same mechanism |
| Buzz Barton v. Giannone (1985) | 108 Ill. 2d 373 — Illinois preliminary injunction standard |
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