“Small Donor Democracy: The Path to Campaign Finance Reform” Panelists Bios

Hon. Anan Abu-Taleb

Anan Abu-Taleb was elected president of Oak Park in April 2013. A successful restaurateur, Abu-Taleb is a longtime village resident, and along with his wife Margi, has raised four children here. Abu-Taleb was born in the Gaza Strip as the second-oldest of 13 children. He immigrated to the Chicago area at the age of 18 to attend college. He earned his undergraduate degree from University of Illinois - Chicago and his MBA from University of Chicago. Abu-Taleb and his family own Maya Del Sol, a popular restaurant on Oak Park Avenue.

Cynthia Canary, Advisor Committee for Economic Development (CED)

Cynthia Canary is a nonprofit management and policy consultant with two decades of leadership experience as an advocate of campaign and government reform in Illinois. She is an advisor to the Committee for Economic Development’s Democratic Institutions Program. Canary served as Chair of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Task Force on Ethics and was Executive Director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform (ICPR) from 1997 to 2011. She previously was a member of the Simon-Stratton Commission and Executive Director of the League of Women Voters of Illinois. During her 14 years as the Executive Director of ICPR, she helped lead the statewide grassroots campaigns leading to the enactment of the 1998 gift ban law, the 2003 ethics law, the 2008 pay-to-play law, and the 2009 campaign finance reform law.

With Kent Redfield, she is the author of Lessons Learned: What the successes and failures of recent reform efforts tell us about the prospects for political reform in Illinois (2012). The Simon Review (Occasional Papers of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute). Paper 33 and the forthcoming, Partisanship, Representation and Redistricting: An Illinois Case Study, which will also be published by The Simon Review.

Canary is on the boards of the Mikva Challenge, the Justice at Stake Campaign and Transparency International-USA.

Carl Johnson, Legal Research Fellow Illinois Campaign for Political Reform

Carl is a graduate of Columbia University Law School. Before joining ICPR, he worked as a judicial intern at the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and the Circuit Court of Cook County. In the summer of 2013, Carl interned at the City of Chicago Law Department, doing employment litigation. He was raised outside of Chicago and received his bachelor’s degree in Sociology from Yale University.

Hon. David Orr, Cook County Clerk

Clerk David Orr is the chief election authority for Cook County, one of the country’s largest election jurisdictions. A local and national voice on election policy, Orr led the fight for Illinois’ “motor voter” law, introduced early voting, and started the state’s first teen election judge program. Orr recently launched a voter registration modernization campaign called “All In,” which aims to bring all eligible voters onto the rolls.

A longtime vocal advocate of campaign finance reform, Orr passed the city’s first major ethics legislation in 1987 with Harold Washington and brought the same reform to the county when he took office as clerk in 1990. Orr’s office has created several online transparency tools to help the public follow the money, including databases of lobbyist reports, Statements of Economic Interests, and TIF revenue data.

Orr sat on the advisory council of the United States Election Administration Commission, is a past president of the National Association of County Recorders, Clerks and Election Officials, and has served as an international election observer in many countries.

A former Chicago alderman, Orr served as vice mayor under Harold Washington, and, following Washington’s death in 1987, Orr took over as mayor during one of the most tumultuous periods in Chicago’s political history. Orr is a Senior Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy.

Judy Stevens, Policy Coordinator, Better Government Association

Judy recently became coordinator of BGA’s policy unit (which is distinct from the probably better known investigations unit), which works to promote policy solutions and advocate for more open, transparent and accountable government. BGA Policy initiatives include “smart streamlining” of Illinois’ sometimes duplicative 7,000 local governments, supporting the public’s right to information through FOIA, addressing administrative abuses that undermine the pension system, addressing the impact of wrongful convictions, supporting and expanding ethics regulation and campaign finance reform.

Judy previously served as Strategic Policy Coordinator at the national headquarters of AFSCME and staff analyst of tax bills at a state legislature. Her Chicago work included: chief aid to a reform alderman, head of a small department of Chicago city government and staff director of a northwest side community organization.

Her volunteer activities included co-founding PRO-CAN (Progressive Chicago Area Network) which in the 1980s involved volunteer attorneys and activists providing free legal support and technical assistance to independent Chicago political campaigns with an emphasis on resource-challenged minority communities. PRO-CAN legal assistance included a lawsuit that overturned a high signature requirement for the ward committeeman ballot.

David R. Melton, Moderator David Melton is a cheesehead and a recovering lawyer, who graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with an undergraduate degree in history and a law degree from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was an active participant in the law school’s Mandel Legal Aid Clinic. He spent his initial ten years in practice focusing mainly on commercial litigation, before shifting his focus to intellectual property litigation (consisting mainly of patent cases) for the last twenty years of his career, which he spent practicing with large law firms in Chicago. He largely retired from the active practice of law in 2009 but he remains active in bar association and law reform efforts in the intellectual property, civil liberties and election law areas.

Throughout his career David has also been active in a variety of law reform efforts and related litigation. In 1981 he participated in litigation challenging Illinois litigation that first authorized multi-bank holding companies in Illinois. (They lost.) In 1988 and 1989 he represented David Orr in litigation aimed at requiring Chicago Mayor Eugene Sawyer to hold a special mayoral election in Chicago in 1989. (They won.) Between 1994 and 1996 he represented Cook County Clerk David Orr in litigation in cooperation with the League and others to force the State of Illinois to comply with provisions of the National “Motor-Voter” legislation. (They won twice and five lawyers, including David and a young Barack Obama received an award for their efforts.) Between 1996 and the present, David has actively participated in evaluating judicial candidates in contested and retention elections, while holding various positions with the Chicago Council of Lawyers, including President of that organization from 2001 to 2003. Earlier this year, he participated as amicus counsel in a federal lawsuit defending the constitutionality of the Illinois campaign finance limits on behalf of three law reform organizations. (They won again.) David is also an active member of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform (which focuses on campaign finance and other issues in Illinois) and the Chicago Council of Lawyer’s Civil Liberties Committee.

David is a resident of Evanston where he lives with his wife Nancy and they raised their two children.. For the past 30 years he has also played basketball in a weekly pick-up game, primarily for the amusement of his friends.