Chapter 1 Both Taylor cases demonstrate that challenges to an election must, in the first instance, be within the dictates of the written election laws. Mr. Taylor lost his case because he did not take the steps that the statute required, and Ms. Taylor lost on her claim because the steps she wanted the election commission to take were not required by the statutes. Would the same fate befall Penny Pullen? B.3. Timely filing In the March 20, 1990 primary election for nomination as the Republican Party candidate for a seat in the Illinois House of Representatives, Penny Pullen came in second to Rosemary Mulligan. Ms. Mulligan received 7,431 votes and Ms. Pullen 7,400, a difference of 31 votes out of 14,831 total votes cast. On April 9, the State Board of Elections certified Ms. Mulligan as the winner. Ten days later, on April 19, Ms. Pullen filed an election contest in the Cook County Circuit Court. Ms. Pullen alleged that a number of irregularities occurred in the election and asked the court to declare her the winner. Ms. Mulligan disagreed about those irregularities, but claimed that other irregularities occurred in the vote count, and asked the court to dismiss Ms. Pullen’s petition. This set the stage for Pullen v. Mulligan, 561 N.E.2d 585 (Ill. 1990), one of the leading cases in the law of election challenges and a case we will come back to several times in the course of this book. The circuit court denied Ms. Mulligan’s motion to dismiss the case and ordered a recount of all of the ballots in that contest. After the recount, Ms. Mulligan and Ms. Pullen each tried to prove that some ballots should be counted while others should not. The circuit court agreed with some of these claims and disagreed with others. When the candidates’ vote totals were adjusted according to the judge’s rulings, Ms. Pullen gained 1 vote and Ms. Mulligan lost 30 votes: the two candidates were tied. The trial court ordered the State Board of Elections to conduct a lottery to determine the winner, as required by the state election code. The lottery was the flip of a coin. Ms. Mulligan won. Then Ms. Pullen appealed the circuit court’s rulings that had been in Ms. Mulligan’s favor, Ms. Mulligan cross-appealed the rulings that had been in Ms. Pullen’s favor, and the Illinois Supreme Court allowed the appeal to be brought directly to it. When the Illinois Supreme Court looked at the case, it first asked whether Ms. Pullen’s initial petition to contest the election was filed in time. The Illinois Supreme Court’s discussion of this question spans nearly seven pages of closely reasoned analysis focusing on the meaning of five words in an Illinois statute. The statute says that a candidate can challenge the nomination of another candidate in a party primary by filing a petition that “…shall be filed within 10 days after the completion of the canvass of the returns by the canvassing board making the final canvass of returns… (Ill.Rev.Stat.1989, sh. 46, par. 7-63).” At 589 (emphasis supplied). But more than one canvassing board is involved in the election process in Illinois. There is the county canvassing board, which canvasses (examines and tabulates) the returns (the votes) within the county, as well as the State Board of Elections, which canvasses (reviews) the tabulated statement of returns (each candidate’s vote totals) it receives from the county canvassing board before proclaiming the result of the primary election. The wording of the statute led to the question: which canvassing board made “the final canvass of returns?” This question was crucial to Ms. Pullen’s ability to maintain her lawsuit because courts can en- 5