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By Phil Helsel and Associated Press
Chicagoans cast ballots Tuesday for mayor in a wide open race in which the incumbent, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, is not running.
Fourteen candidates are on the ballot for mayor of the country’s third-largest city, including a member of the Daley family whose father and brother previously held the office for a total of more than 40 years.
It is the largest number of candidates for mayor in the city’s history, NBC Chicago reported.
Polls were set to close at 7 p.m. With so many candidates, the Associated Press reported that the contest was almost certain to go to a runoff. One polling location would be open until 8 p.m. because of a late opening, and anyone in line before 7 p.m. elsewhere will be allowed to vote, the elections board tweeted.
Under Chicago’s rules, to avoid a runoff a candidate would need to get more than 50 percent of the votes. If no candidate reaches that threshold the top two candidates will compete against each other on an April 2 runoff, according to the city’s Board of Elections.
Although a nonpartisan election, the candidates are all attached in varying degrees to the Democratic Party. The Republican Party has virtually disappeared from the city.
Emanuel announced in September that he would not seek a third term, a decision that was considered a surprise. Emanuel, a former Democratic congressman and chief of staff to President Barack Obama, was elected mayor in 2011.
The 14 candidates running include William “Bill” Daley, an attorney and former U.S. Commerce secretary in the Clinton administration and Obama’s White House chief of staff. He is the son of former mayor Richard J. Daley and the brother of former mayor Richard M. Daley.
Richard J. and Richard M. Daley were mayor for a combined nearly 43 years out of a 55-year span before Emanuel took the oath in 2011, according to the AP.
The Associated Press reported that the highest-profile candidates appear to be Daley; Toni Preckwinkle, who is the Cook County Board President and a former teacher and city alderman; Illinois Comptroller Susana A. Mendoza, who was elected in 2016; Lori Lightfoot, an former assistant U.S. attorney and former president of the Chicago Police Board; and Gery Chico, an attorney who was former Mayor Richard M. Daley’s chief of staff, and who ran for the office in 2011 but came in second of six candidates behind Emanuel, according to NBC Chicago.
The other candidates include Jerry Joyce, a small business owner and attorney; Paul Vallas, a former CEO of Chicago Public Schools; Willie Wilson, who ran for mayor in 2015; former Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy, who was fired by Emanuel in 2015 following the police shooting of Laquan McDonald; and Amara Enyia, an attorney, community activist and former journalist.
Also running are La Shawn K. Ford, a Democratic Illinois state representative; startup founder Neal Sáles-Griffin; Robert “Bob” Fioretti, a former alderman who also announced he was running for mayor in 2015 but who dropped out and endorsed Emanuel’s re-election bid; and John Kenneth Kozlar, who twice ran for alderman and who in 2015 forced a run-off with Patrick Daley Thompson, who won.
Voting during the day Tuesday suggested that the day could end with a historically low voter turnout barring a late surge, officials said according to NBC Chicago.
Just before 1 p.m. the city’s Board of Elections reported voting totals at slightly over 303,000, and of that total only 55 percent came from election day voting, according to the station.
“Normally at this hour we would be way ahead of that,” Chicago Election Board spokesman Jim Allen said Tuesday afternoon, according to NBC Chicago.
Allen said that one reason for apparently low turnout may be that polling shows no clear frontrunner in the race and that “it appears that some voters are either just disengaged or not willing to make a decision until they know who’s in the runoff, assuming there is a runoff.”
NBC Chicago reported that the vote totals Tuesday afternoon could put this election day on pace to end with around 30 percent or registered voters casting ballots, and that the record low was 33.08 percent recorded in 2007.