The headline race was of course the Village President race. Vicki Scaman took the race by a wide margin, garnering 57% of the vote to Cate Readling's 43%. Most people cast a vote in this race, the undervote (number of possible votes not cast) was only 1.7%, which for this race was extremely low.
The hotly contested Village Trustee race had three open Trustee spots, won by Ravi Parakkat, Lucia Robinson, and Chibuike Enyia. This split the 'Unite' slate, picking off one member of the 'Represent' coalition (the 'it's not a slate' coalition). Oak Park seems to have an abiding distrust of slates, perhaps a hangover from the VMA era, this might help to explain the split ticket. Though the last member of the Unite slate, Stephen Morales did not make the electoral cut, he still took more votes than Juanta Griffin and Anthony Clark. Clark collected the fewest number of votes of all the candidates.
The Oak Park voter seemed much more conflicted by the Trustee race, with the undervote % topping 36%. Likely many people picked only one or two candidates they trusted.
Rounding out the Village elections, the Village Clerk position was easily won by Christina Waters with 78% of the vote to LouAnne Johannesson's 22%.
In the D200 race Fred Arkin, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Kebreab Henry, and Thomas Cofsky all won handily, with an almost 900 vote margin separating that group from the next highest vote getter, Elias Ortega.
In the D97 race Venus Hurd Johnson, Jeremy Duffy, and Nancy Ross Dribin took the top 3 spots by a good margin. This race had a relatively low undervote % of 18%.
Over at the library, things get a bit interesting, Saria Lofton, Matthew Fruth, Sarah Glavin, and Madhurima Chakraborty all won with Peter Prokopowicz over 1000 votes behind them all. But Saria Lofton dropped out of the race after ballots were printed. Effectively this means she was elected, but will have to now resign and be replaced by the Library Board. You might think the obvious choice would be Pete, but Matt Fruth has indicated that he might just select randomly from registered voters and offer them the position instead.
https://www.oakpark.com/2021/04/07/candidate-who-dropped-race-wins-library-trustee-seat/
The Township Supervisor, Clerk and Assessor races were uncontested. The Assessor, Ali Elsaffar, is the most popular candidate in Oak Park Politics, taking home the top vote tally of 9,016 votes.
The Township Trustee race is more heavily contested with 6 candidates for 4 slots. Before all of the mail in votes have been counted, Ade Onayemi, Tim Thomas, Margaret Trybus, and Jacquelyn Rodriguez are the provisional winners. But Jacquelyn Rodriguez is only 8 votes ahead of Eric Davis. So things might change when all the votes are in.
This might be another indication of the Oak Park electorate's distaste for slates as Eric Davis is the 4th member of the 'Oak Park Community Service Party'.
The Park District election went uncontested with 2 candidates for 2 open slots. Congratulations to our new Commissioners David Wick, and Sandy Lentz.
Congratulations to all of the winners, and thank you to all of the candidates. It takes a lot of guts and perseverance to run for office in Oak Park. You faced both a demanding electorate and a complicating pandemic crisis. You survived a gauntlet of forums, talks and zooms, and if you were lucky, avoided causing a Facebook freakout. Thank you all.
All the precincts are in, and there are just some mail in votes to be counted. Aside from an 8 vote difference in the Township Trustee race, those mail in voter tallies are unlikely to shift any of these results.
I've created a summary of the results here: April 6th, 2021 Election Results Spreadsheet
