Case Study: How On the Ballot LLC Got 20 Candidates on the Ballot in Cook County

The Challenge: Petition Challenges Are a Chicago Tradition

In Cook County, knocking a rival off the ballot over petition signatures is practically a civic ritual. In 1996, a young Barack Obama challenged the incumbent's petitions and removed her from the ballot. Three decades later, signature challenges are still a defining feature of every Chicago-area race.

On the Ballot LLC, a three-year-old consultancy led by CEO Matt Moeller, works largely in the school board sector — making sure candidates qualify for the ballot, and filing objections when opponents fall short. Cook County's first elected school board cycle saw them support about 10 candidates. This cycle, they took on nearly twice that.

The problem: the previous cycle, candidates who came in late and didn't verify their signatures got challenged and knocked off. Matt's team went into this cycle expecting a wave of challenges — and decided to pre-vet every signature before filing.

The Stakes

Petition math is unforgiving. In one race, a candidate needed 500 valid signatures but could turn in a maximum of 1,500. To file the right number, you have to know — quickly and accurately — how many of your collected signatures are actually good: a real voter, in the right district, name and address matching, not a duplicate.

"How do you understand who all these people are that are signing these petitions, and quickly be able to understand if they're a valid match or a valid voter in the right district?"

Doing that by hand, across thousands of signatures and twenty candidates, simply doesn't scale.

The Approach: Pre-Vet Everything Before Filing

On the Ballot LLC built their workflow around Petition Validator:

**Upload the petition pages** and let the AI transcribe each signature and identify valid matches and out-of-district signers.

**Use the search feature** to narrow the universe of "likely" matches down to the ones that were genuinely uncertain.

**Send only that narrowed set to the Board of Elections** for manual signature-image verification — instead of starting every signature from square one.

"We were able to really focus a lot of our efforts on verifying and vetting the signature image, instead of starting from square one. That's where the Petition Validator tool really helped us out."

That shift — letting AI handle valid-match and out-of-district triage so humans focus only on the images that need a trained eye — is what made the volume manageable.

The Results

Across the cycle, On the Ballot LLC pre-vetted nearly 30,000 signatures for close to 20 candidates. Because they vetted before filing rather than after a challenge:

Only one of nearly 20 candidates was challenged: — and that candidate's records examination finished roughly **284 signatures over the minimum**, an easy win.

Every candidate the firm supported is on track to make the November ballot.

They scaled from working with **three or four candidates' worth of manual capacity to nearly twenty** — "because we were able to focus our energy where it was most important for the human to be focused."

"Together there's a sort of exponential value — and clearly exponential volume — in terms of what we've been able to achieve in this school board cycle."

Why This Matters

Matt is clear that the tool isn't magic on its own: "the tool is only as good as the people that are implementing it." Petition Validator handled the triage; On the Ballot LLC brought deep local expertise in Illinois, Cook County, and City of Chicago petition rules. Together, the combination let a small team protect twenty candidacies at once.

That's the compounding effect Petition Validator is built for: faster, more accurate signature review that frees consultants and campaigns to scale the work that actually gets candidates on the ballot.