From [HERE] Downtown Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd) on Friday abandoned plans to try and knock Mayor Lori Lightfoot off the ballot — even after uncovering what he said was a “pattern of fraud” that suggested she may not have the 12,500 valid signatures required by law.

After a “cursory review” of all of the roughly 40,000 signatures that Lightfoot filed on Monday and getting “well into a secondary” review to see if those signatures match the signatures of those voters on file, Hopkins said he “got it down to about 17,500 signatures” when he “ran out of time.” 

“Had we had a couple more weeks, there is a clear pattern of fraud. We might have been able to get her under 12,500. But the only way to do that is an individual line-by-line signature comparison. And then to have voters step forward, sign affidavits and say, `That’s not my signature.’ We just don’t have time to do that. So we’re not gonna file a challenge,” Hopkins said Friday.

Hopkins described the “pattern of fraud” in Lightfoot’s nominating petitions as “classic round-tabling” made famous in Chicago.

“You get four to five people sitting at a table passing clipboards around so that fraudulent signatures do not match the one on the line above and below. … It’s three or four, or possibly five lines away, and you have to look for that pattern. … It starts to become apparent that it’s the same small group of circulators signing voters’ names and just guessing what the signatures might look like,” Hopkins said. [MORE]