Skokie voters may in the future be able to decide whether the village should adopt term limits for elected officials and whether the town should implement ranked choice voting.
Mayor George Van Dusen introduced a resolution at the Village Board’s April 1 meeting to put term limits on the ballot in a referendum in the November 2024 election. Under the proposed language, village trustees, the clerk and the mayor could serve a maximum of three terms.
The Village Board also considered a referendum that will allow voters to decide whether to implement ranked-choice voting, also known as runoff voting.
Trustees postponed voting on the resolution so they could further refine its language.
Van Dusen told Pioneer Press that he brought the two referendums to the village board after Trustee James Johnson circulated petitions for them. “I just thought, rather than getting into a big argument and public fight, if we’re going to put term limits before the board, let the board decide if it wants to put it on the ballot,” Van Dusen said.
“I suspect the board will want to put it on the ballot, but that will be the board’s decision,” said Van Dusen.
In June 2022, Van Dusen withdrew three referendum questions on environmental sustainability topics that would have prevented election reform questions from coming before voters, because state law limits the number of referendum questions on the ballot to three.
Van Dusen, who has been mayor since being appointed in 1999, said he personally is not in favor of term limits and disagrees with the belief that public officials who have remained in office for longer periods of time are not receptive to new ideas.
“I think you lose something as well with that more turnover, but I think people should be able to vote on it and make up their own minds,” he said. Van Dusen said he did not feel that the idea of term limits is targeted towards him because the term limits would be for the future, and he doesn’t picture himself still being mayor after three more terms.
Van Dusen said he and Trustee Alison Pure Slovin had also previously discussed term limits, and he told Pure Slovin he would put them on the ballot for the November election. Van Dusen said he hadn’t been well-versed in ranked choice voting but decided to put it on the agenda to avoid the “turmoil” the village board has had in the past.
In a ranked choice voting system, voters select the candidate who is their first choice and then have the option to rank additional candidates. If a candidate receives more than half of votes as a first choice, they win. If no candidate receives a majority, the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated and each of their votes are redistributed to their supporters’ second choice candidate, and so on, until one candidate secures more than 50% of the votes.
Trustee Alison Pure Slovin suggested that the board be precise with the referendum’s language and specify that each term limit is to last four years, given the fact that some trustee slots in the 2025 election will be for two-year terms.
According to the resolution, the village does not have term limits for its elected positions and “historically elected officials have often served for multiple terms of four years each, including on the previous Village Board when Trustees had served five terms.”
Trustee Edie Sue Sutker also made a substitute motion to delay the board’s decision so that ranked-choice voting could stay on the ballot. “Voters are asking for that,” said Sutker. It will be up to voters to decide.”
Trustee James Johnson, the only village board member not aligned with the Skokie Caucus Party, provided Pioneer Press with a statement saying he has been collecting signatures to get the two electoral reforms on the April 2025 ballot in Skokie.
Johnson called the village board’s unanimous support of the referendums “a surprising but encouraging move.” In 2022, Skokie voters approved through three referendums an overhaul of the village’s election process by implementing staggered terms for trustees, making elections non-partisan and establishing trustee districts.
