Early voting starts and campaign potpourri

The Alliance of Bar Associations was reluctant to release its judicial candidate ratings before they were complete. Early voting, however starts Monday, January 14. (That's a link to Cook County Clerk David Orr's website page explaining the early voting procedure.) Because some voters might otherwise be casting votes for judges without any input from the Alliance, the Alliance opted to release such information as it has.

There are 50 sites in the City of Chicago where early voters may record their votes; there are also 44 early voting sites for Cook County suburban voters (including the County Clerk's downtown Chicago office). Note that many of the suburban sites and all of the City sites are open on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, January 21. City residents looking to cast their early votes on Sunday can do so downtown.

This "early voting" procedure is different from absentee voting. Here's a link to the City of Chicago absentee voting information page (from which an absentee ballot application may be downloaded); suburban Cook County voters can navigate from this page to get their absentee ballot applications.

In the meantime, campaigning continues... not just door to door, but here on the Internet. A couple of quick examples: I've already mentioned that Judge Jesse G. Reyes has a campaign-related MySpace page -- well, yesterday, Judge Thomas R. Mulroy sent out an email touting his new Facebook page. And, this morning, I found this YouTube site for S I Hersh Productions -- and on the front page of this site links to interviews with Judge Joan Powell and Paula Lingo and Judge Michael B. Hyman. (Those are links to the actual interviews; I could post the videos here, but each is about 13 minutes long and would significantly slow the loading of this page.)

You can find information about judicial candidates in Cook County almost everywhere you look... except in your daily newspaper.

More about that later.