One countywide, three subcircuit vacancies open up at the last moment

Justice Stuart E. Palmer, a Circuit Court judge who has been serving on the Illinois Appellate Court pursuant to Supreme Court assignment, has announced his intention to step down, opening a second countywide Circuit Court vacancy for the special filing period which begins on December 14 (the other is the vacancy of Judge Marilyn F. Johnson).

The Illinois State Board of Elections has also posted three new subcircuit vacancies, the 5th Subcircuit vacancy of Judge Loretta Eadie-Daniels, and two vacancies in the 12th Subcircuit, those of Judges Joseph G. Kazmierski, Jr. and Veronica B. Mathein.

Sean Chaudhuri and Patrick Heneghan are the candidates 'pre-slated' by the Democratic Party for the Johnson and Palmer vacancies, respectively.

If you visit the ISBE website to confirm these new vacancies, you may encounter the same difficulty I did in trying to document this story for this post. I saw this announcement on the ISBE website this morning before I'd started my morning coffee --

-- but when I clicked on the link and generated this screen --

-- and then clicked on the link to get the .pdf report -- what should I get but the same old "Vacancies as of November 18" list I'd seen 100 times.

Fortunately, ISBE General Counsel Ken Menzel was able to confirm the new vacancies for me and tell me how to work around the technology issue so I could generate the correct report (I had to open the web page in a different browser -- Chrome, in my case, instead of my usual Firefox). Mr. Menzel was kind enough to say he'd had the same problem, at first, and I bring this up only because some of my readers may have experienced it as well. In any event, my thanks to Mr. Menzel.