Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle waits early in the morning with signed petitions to file for her candidacy to run for mayor of Chicago at the Chicago Board of Elections on Nov. 19, 2018. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune)

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle waits early in the morning with signed petitions to file for her candidacy to run for mayor of Chicago at the Chicago Board of Elections on Nov. 19, 2018.

Chicago is in for ballot bedlam starting on Monday, when an anticipated 16 candidates for mayor will begin submitting the required nominating petitions to qualify for the Feb. 26 city election. The arcane process, in which each hopeful turns in thousands of voter signatures, will kick off a monthlong period of legal wrangling, with mayoral contenders challenging one another’s petitions in a series of aggressive attempts to narrow the large field. To appear on the ballot, each candidate is required by law to submit 12,500 signatures from registered Chicago voters. The rule of thumb, however, is for a campaign to collect three times that number because challengers can use charges of forgery, fraud and more minor technicalities to invalidate signatures and knock opponents out of the race. The 2019 mayor’s race has drawn an unusually large throng of candidates, a group that swelled after Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s surprise announcement in September that he would abandon his bid for a third term. If no mayoral hopeful gets more than 50 percent of the vote in the February race — a strong likelihood given the sheer number of candidates — the top two vote-getters will qualify for a head-to-head April 2 runoff election. The competition to finish in the top two positions is fierce and creates high motivation for candidates to try to get foes knocked off the ballot, especially those they view as the strongest competition for their base of voters. Chicago mayor's race: Who is in, who is out and who is still thinking about it » “You’re going to have candidates challenging each other all over the place. It will be crazy,” said veteran South Side Ald. Roderick Sawyer, 6th. “It’s going to be a boon for the lawyers, and this will go right up until the printing of the ballots. It’s going to be a battle royale.” Candidates have a 90-day window to collect the petition signatures, starting Aug. 28 and ending Nov. 26 — the last day to turn them in to election officials. The deadline to challenge a candidate’s petitions is a week later on Dec. 3, and the names appearing on the ballot have to be certified by no later than Dec. 20, according to the election board. Veteran election lawyers, political operatives and the candidates expect dozens of challenges to be filed during that time. Then, hearing officers, the election board and even judges will determine which signatures count and who gets on the ballot. “It’s going to be an administrative nightmare, and it’s going to be a long, grueling process,” said downtown Ald. Brendan Reilly, 42nd. “They are going to be checking hundreds of thousands of voter records in a very short period of time. When you have 16 campaigns potentially going through this challenge process … that is going to be an incredible burden, not just on the board of elections, but on the campaigns.” ‘It’s going to be pandemonium’ Officials with the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners accept the petitions for a week, and the candidates who are lined up to submit their signatures at 9 a.m. Monday will be entered in a lottery to determine whose name will appear at the top of the ballot, a position that is considered advantageous. There is, however, also an advantage to waiting until the last minute to file. That gives competing campaigns one less week to review rivals’ signatures, in some cases making it more difficult to mount a legal challenge. The campaigns that most successfully navigate this terrain are the ones that are organized and carefully have monitored their signature progress from the start, said Democratic campaign strategist Tom Bowen. “If you have a plan and are diligent and are tracking it the entire time through, it is not an insurmountable challenge at all,” said Bowen, Emanuel’s onetime political director. “When it becomes difficult is when people wait too long to begin the process, when they’re not tracking their progress regularly and when they engage paid signature gatherers who have a financial incentive to fake results.” Bowen said it’s not always easy for a campaign to “catch all the ways people are trying to defraud you,” because of the high volume of signatures that get collected. It’s also not unusual for campaigns to get signatures from people who don’t reside in the city, aren’t registered to vote or are not registered at their current address — all common issues that can get a signature disqualified. That’s why the goal is for campaigns to get 37,500 signatures instead of the minimum 12,500. “The reason it takes three times as many signatures is because voter registration rates in the city are about 50 percent,” said Mike Kasper, a longtime election lawyer who has worked on behalf of House Speaker Michael Madigan, Emanuel and other top Democrats. “So, if you’re standing on the street corner — assuming all the people you see live in the city — you have to take half right off the top, because they’re not registered.” Other technical issues can get signatures thrown out, including: not binding the petition pages together, not numbering pages properly, submitting signatures that don’t match the ones on file with the election board and turning in petition sheets certified by a notary whose commission has expired. Another key factor: The law only allows a registered voter to sign the petition of one mayoral candidate. So, if one voter signs four candidates’ petitions, only the first one they sign counts, election lawyers said. With as many as 16 candidates filing petitions, the potential for a complicated web of legal maneuvering emerges. “It’s going to be pandemonium,” Kasper predicted. “If there are 16 candidates, and they all file 16 challenges — right there you’re talking about more than 250 cases.” Plus, any citizen can file a challenge. When Emanuel first ran for mayor in 2011, more than 30 people challenged his candidacy on the grounds that he hadn’t established Chicago residency because he was renting his home while working in Washington as then-President Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff. At one point, an appellate court tossed Emanuel from the ballot only to later get overruled by the Illinois Supreme Court. Longtime election lawyer Burt Odelson led the charge in trying to get Emanuel booted from the ballot. This year, he’ll represent former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas and is girding himself for the toughest Chicago mayoral ballot battle of all time. “In my career, dating back 46 years to the first Richard Daley, there has never been a race for Chicago mayor like this, with so many potential candidates and potential challenges,” Odelson said. “I think it’s going to be bedlam.”