Guide 07

Illinois Nominating Petitions: A Guide for Candidates and Committeepersons

An Illinois nominating petition is the signed paper form that puts your name on the ballot. Almost every local candidate needs one, and so does anyone running for a party committeeperson post. The number of signatures depends on the office: a precinct committeeperson needs at least 10, a Chicago alderperson at least 473, a school board candidate 50 or 10% (whichever is less), and many municipal offices use a percentage of the last election's vote. Every signature goes on the official form, in ink, and every sheet carries a notarized circulator statement.

For the 2027 consolidated elections, petitions are filed in one of two windows: October 19 to 26, 2026 for offices on the February 23, 2027 ballot, or November 16 to 23, 2026 for offices on the April 6, 2027 ballot. Because objections can strike signatures after you file, the goal is never the minimum. Collect a comfortable margin, confirm your exact number with your election authority, and file early in your window.

This guide covers each of those pieces in turn: who needs a petition, how many signatures each office requires, the 2027 calendar, the paper rules, objections, margin, and how to collect signatures door to door in a way that holds up.

Who needs a nominating petition in Illinois

If you want your name printed on an Illinois ballot as a candidate for local office, you almost certainly need to file a nominating petition. That includes:

• Municipal candidates: mayors, village presidents, trustees, clerks, alderpersons and city council members, whether they run as party candidates, nonpartisan candidates or independents.
• Local board candidates: school boards, park districts, library districts, community college boards, fire protection districts and forest preserve boards.
• City of Chicago candidates: mayor, clerk, treasurer and alderperson.
• Party committeepersons: precinct committeepersons outside Cook County, and ward or township committeepersons in Cook County, run on petitions at the general primary.

One office you will not see on the 2027 ballot is township office. Township elections are next held in April 2029, so a township supervisor or trustee hopeful has no petition to circulate this cycle.

Before you circulate a single sheet, read 12 mistakes that knock Illinois candidates off the ballot, then walk through filling out an Illinois nominating petition, part by part.

How many signatures you need, by office

The signature requirement is set by statute for each office. Some are fixed numbers, some are percentages of a past vote, and a few are "whichever is less" formulas. The table below summarizes the requirements published in the Illinois State Board of Elections 2027 Candidate's Guide. For a fuller walk through each office, see how many signatures you need to run for office in Illinois.

Always confirm your exact number with your election authority (your county clerk, or the board of election commissioners if your area has one). A percentage only becomes a real number once someone applies it to the right base, and the clerk's office is the source that counts.

Reading a percentage requirement

When a requirement is written as a percentage, the work is in knowing what it is a percentage of. "0.5% of that party's primary voters at the last regular election" means the count of people who took that party's ballot in your municipality at the last comparable election, not the total population or the number of registered voters. Your election authority can tell you the base number and the resulting minimum.

Ranges have a ceiling as well as a floor

Some requirements are written as a range, such as 5% to 8% for nonpartisan city candidates and independents. A range means there is a maximum as well as a minimum. You still want a margin above the floor, but you plan that margin inside the range. If your office uses a range, ask your election authority for both numbers before you start collecting.

Committeeperson signature requirements

Party committeeperson petitions follow 10 ILCS 5/7-10(i):

For ward and township committeepersons, the maximum is the higher percentage or 50 signatures above the minimum, whichever is greater. Cook County petitions have their own wrinkles, which we cover in ward and township committeeperson petitions in Cook County.

The 2027 petition calendar

The 2027 consolidated elections run on two tracks. Which one applies to you depends on your office and, for some villages, on local choices, so confirm your track with your village or county clerk before you plan anything else.

Two points are worth underlining. First, filing periods moved about three weeks earlier this cycle (P.A. 103-0586 and 103-0600). Candidates who remember filing in December in past cycles should recheck their calendar. Second, in Chicago the February 23 election is the municipal general: a candidate who wins more than 50% of the vote is elected outright, and the April 6 date is the runoff for races where no one cleared that bar.

Work backward from your filing window. If you are on the April track and want to file on the first day, November 16, your signatures need to be collected, counted and checked before then, which leaves less time than the calendar suggests.

The paper rules: ink, the official form and a notarized circulator

Illinois candidate and committeeperson petitions are paper documents. There is no online or electronic signature option for them. Three rules shape how you collect:

• Ink on the official form. Each signer signs in ink on the official petition form for your office. Use the form your election authority provides or specifies, and keep every sheet for one candidate and one office consistent.
• A notarized circulator statement. The person who gathered the signatures on a sheet signs a circulator statement for that sheet, and that statement is notarized. Plan notary time into your schedule, especially for volunteers who collect on evenings and weekends.
• Signers who can legally sign. The signatures that count come from the people the statute names, such as the party's primary electors in the precinct for a precinct committeeperson. A signature from someone who lives outside your district does not help you, however friendly they were.

If you are recruiting volunteers to circulate, give them a short written sheet that covers these rules, and check their first few pages yourself. Our post on circulating a nominating petition in Illinois without losing signatures goes through the circulator's side of the work step by step.

For the people carrying the sheets, see recruiting and training petition circulators and 15 petition circulating tips.

Objections: why signatures get struck

Once petitions are filed, there is a short window for objections. For 2027 that window closes November 2, 2026 on the February track and December 1 or 2, 2026 on the April track. An objection challenges your signatures, and the ones found invalid are struck. If enough are struck to put you below the minimum, your name does not go on the ballot.

The most common problems are the ones you can see coming when you collect:

• Signers outside the district. Someone who lives one street past the boundary, or who has moved, cannot sign for you.
• Duplicates. The same person signing twice, on your sheet or a volunteer's, adds nothing.
• Signers who are not eligible for that petition, such as someone who is not one of the party's primary electors on a party petition.

You cannot prevent someone from filing an objection, but you can make one unlikely to succeed. Collect from households you know are inside the district, review sheets as they come in, and file with a margin. Our guide to petition objections in Illinois and how to protect your signatures covers the process in more depth.

How many signatures to collect above the minimum

The law sets a minimum; it does not tell you how many extra to bring. That is a judgment call, and it depends on how carefully your signatures were collected and how likely a challenge is in your race.

As a matter of common practice, many campaigns aim for 1.5 to 2 times the minimum. That is not a legal rule, and for some offices it would not be possible: if your office uses a range such as 5% to 8%, the ceiling caps how far above the floor you can go. Treat the margin as insurance and size it to your risk. A first-time candidate in a contested race, collecting with new volunteers, has more reason to aim high than an incumbent board member whose sheets were all gathered by one careful circulator.

For a fuller look at how to set the number, including how to think about ranges and what kinds of mistakes a margin protects you from, read how many signatures to collect above the minimum.

Collecting petition signatures door to door

You can collect signatures at events, at the train station or outside the grocery store, and many candidates do. Door to door collection has advantages that matter for a petition, though:

• You know where the signer lives. If you are working from a list of households inside your district, every signature is from an address you have already placed in the district. That is the single best protection against a residency objection.
• You meet voters on their own doorstep. A petition visit is a real conversation with someone who will be voting in a few months. It is often the first contact a campaign has with its eventual supporters.
• You can plan it. A list of doors can be divided, assigned and tracked. Volunteers know where to go and you know what has been covered.

Turning the signature number into doors

Start from your target (the minimum plus your margin), then work backward. Not everyone will be home, and not everyone who answers will sign. Track your own results over the first few evenings: how many doors a circulator reaches in an hour, and what share of the people who answer sign. Those two numbers tell you how many doors you need and how many volunteer hours that takes. Adjust as the real numbers come in rather than relying on a guess made before the first door.

Organizing the walk

A simple plan works well:

1. Get a list of the households in your district from your county party or your election authority, and confirm the district boundary.
2. Divide the list into turfs that one circulator can cover in a session.
3. Assign each turf to a circulator, with their own petition sheets for your office.
4. Record which doors were visited and what happened: signed, not home, come back later.
5. Send circulators back to the not-home and come-back-later doors before opening new turf.
6. Collect sheets after each session, count signatures, and get circulator statements notarized.

This is the part of petition season that Beacon is built to help with. Beacon puts your walk list on a map, routes circulators door to door, works offline and syncs later, and records which doors were visited and the result at each one. You can add a survey question such as "signed: yes/no" so you know where you stand by turf. The paper sheet stays the legal record of each signature; Beacon keeps track of the doors and the follow-ups so nothing falls through between sessions. Unlimited canvassers are included on every plan, so you can add volunteers without adding seats.

For a precinct-by-precinct plan you can adapt, see collecting petition signatures door to door.

Petitions for precinct, ward and township committeepersons

Committeeperson petitions are smaller than most candidate petitions, but they lead to a role with real weight inside the party.

Outside Cook County: precinct committeepersons

Outside Cook County, each party's primary voters elect one precinct committeeperson per precinct at the general primary every two years (10 ILCS 5/7-8(b)). Candidates must be a bona fide resident of the precinct, and the petition needs at least 10 signatures of the party's primary electors in that precinct (10 ILCS 5/7-10(i)). The most recent general primary was March 17, 2026; the next is the 2028 general primary.

Ten signatures sounds simple, and it usually is. The same rules apply, though: ink on the official form, a notarized circulator statement, and signers who are the party's primary electors in your precinct. A margin still makes sense, because ten valid signatures leaves no room for a single struck line.

In Cook County: ward and township committeepersons

Cook County does not elect precinct committeepersons. Chicago voters elect a ward committeeperson for each ward, and suburban Cook voters elect a township committeeperson for each township, at the general primary every four years (10 ILCS 5/7-8(b)). These petitions use percentages with a ceiling, as shown in the table above, which makes margin planning more careful than it is for a precinct petition. Precinct captains in Cook County are volunteers organized by the ward or township organization rather than an elected office, so they do not file petitions of their own.

Why the seat matters

A precinct committeeperson is a member of the county central committee, which is made up of the party's township, precinct and ward committeepersons in the county (10 ILCS 5/7-8(d)). On that committee, each precinct committeeperson has one vote for each ballot cast in their precinct by the party's primary voters at the primary where they were elected. In practice, a precinct that turns out more of its party's primary voters gives its committeeperson a bigger vote. The same weighting applies on municipal, multi-township and, outside Cook County, judicial subcircuit committees (10 ILCS 5/7-8).

Committeepersons are also the people most county parties ask to recruit election judges for their precinct. The county central committee chairs of the two leading parties furnish the lists that judges are appointed from, and the chairs are directed to list people who live in the precinct "insofar as possible" (10 ILCS 5/13-1).

If you are thinking about the role itself rather than just the petition, our precinct committeeperson guide covers the job from start to finish.

After you file

Filing is not the end of petition season. A few things are worth doing once your petition is in:

• Keep copies of everything. Keep a copy of every sheet and a record of what you filed and when, with your own count by sheet. If an objection is filed, you will want to answer it quickly.
• Watch the objection deadline. Mark the date for your track (November 2 or December 1 or 2, 2026) and keep your calendar clear in the days after it.
• Plan for the ballot certification date. Ballots are certified on December 17, 2026 for the February track and January 28, 2027 for the April track. Early voting follows within weeks.
• Put the doors you walked to work. Every household you visited during petition season is a household you have already met. The notes your circulators took at the door, who signed, who asked a question, who wanted a yard sign, are the start of your voter contact plan.

One caution on that last point: a petition signature is not permission to text someone. A petition or sign-in sheet only counts as consent to receive texts if the sheet says so plainly and the date is recorded. Do not assume you can text everyone who signed.

Before filing day, run through how to check your own petition before you file, then read what happens on filing day, including the ballot lottery.

Frequently asked questions

Can I collect nominating petition signatures online in Illinois?

No. Illinois candidate and committeeperson petitions are signed in ink on the official paper form, and each sheet carries a notarized circulator statement. Digital tools can help you plan routes and track which doors you visited, but the signatures themselves go on paper.

How many signatures do I need to run for precinct committeeperson?

Outside Cook County, at least 10 signatures of your party's primary electors in the precinct (10 ILCS 5/7-10(i)). Cook County elects ward and township committeepersons instead, using percentage ranges. Confirm the exact requirement with your election authority.

When do I file petitions for the April 6, 2027 election?

The filing period for the April 6, 2027 track is November 16 to 23, 2026. Offices on the February 23, 2027 track, including all City of Chicago offices, file October 19 to 26, 2026. Confirm your track with your village or county clerk.

How many extra signatures should I collect?

There is no legal rule. As common practice, many campaigns aim for 1.5 to 2 times the minimum, staying under any maximum their office has. Size the margin to your risk of an objection and to how carefully your sheets were collected.

Are there township elections in 2027?

No. No township offices are on the 2027 ballot. Township offices are next on the ballot in April 2029.

Plan your petition walk with Beacon

Petition season rewards organization: the right doors, a clear record of who has been visited, and circulators who know where to go next. Beacon gives your team a map-based walk list, door-to-door routing, offline mode and a record of every door's result, with unlimited canvassers on every plan. Start a 14-day Beacon trial and set up your first petition turf before your filing window opens.