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George Cardenas has been a fixture in Southwest Side politics for decades, a consummate insider who followed five Chicago City Council election wins with another victory that took him to the obscure but powerful Cook County Board of Review .

But now he finds himself in a fight befitting a novice, after a challenge to the petition signatures his campaign collected left him 273 short of what he needs to run for reelection in March’s Democratic primary. On Friday, seated across from a foot-tall stack of evidence, his legal team began the painstaking, line-by-line rebuttal to try to claw Cardenas’ way back onto the ballot.

In cutthroat Cook County politics, gathering good petition signatures is the first hurdle for any would-be candidate. It’

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