Editorial: Voters, don’t swallow campaign snake oil. Make candidates earn your vote.

It’s campaign season ahead of the June 28 Illinois primary, which means voters can expect waves of campaign ads on television and social media and in mailboxes. Candidates will blather on about what matters to them, how they’re the messianic answer to Springfield’s problems, how their opponents will bring scourge and ruin to the lives of Illinoisans.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if, for once, they actually listened to what matters to Illinois voters? If that magical moment ever came, would voters seize it, put candidates’ feet to the fire and ask questions that revealed how ready or ill-prepared a candidate was to fix what’s really wrong in this state?

Given the magnitude of dysfunction in Springfield, that’s exactly what needs to happen during this election cycle. Illinois is too imperiled by long-term financial gloom and a legacy of corruption for voters to passively absorb whatever self-serving campaign snake oil candidates serve up. We would love to see voters take a far more proactive approach toward candidates at campaign forums and appearances, and at doorsteps when candidates come knocking.

Illinois’ troubles are manifold, but here are three areas voters can focus on:

— Ever-rising property taxes pose one of the biggest burdens to the bank accounts of Illinoisans, no matter their party preference. They’re a major reason why Illinois continues to bleed population. In 2019, Democrats, led by Gov. J.B. Pritzker, pledged property tax reform. Pritzker even formed a legislative task force with marching orders to find ways to provide property tax relief to Illinoisans. At the time, the task force’s chairman, state Rep. Sam Yingling, a Democrat from Grayslake, said, “Introducing anything less than a substantial overhaul will not be tolerated by the public.”

Nearly three years later, there’s been no glint of an overhaul, or even a tweak to the property tax problem, for that matter. The task force’s draft report sits on a shelf, unused and unread. Not that it had much utility — one of its recommendations called for raising taxes, as in higher sales taxes.

How about real property tax reform that excises the bloat out of government? That bloat can easily be found in the overlap and duplication of local government in Illinois, which has nearly 9,000 local taxing bodies. No other state has as many local governments.

So, Candidate X, what’s your recipe for property tax reform?

— Illinois will never crawl out of its financial sinkhole until it embraces genuine pension reform, and that won’t happen as long as lawmakers continue to avoid putting on the ballot an amendment to the Illinois Constitution that would fix what’s wrong with the state’s pension system. That amendment would essentially leave current earned benefits untouched, but would allow for reductions in future benefit growth to levels that the state could afford.

The last time we looked, Illinois’ unfunded pension liabilities stood at roughly $130 billion. Pritzker’s 2023 budget adds an extra $500 million payment on top of the state’s required $9.6 billion contribution to Illinois’ pension plans, but that’s still only chipping away at a problem that requires structural change. And that only will come when a pension reform amendment gets approved.

Candidate X, do you want to continue nibbling at the pension problem, or do you support fixing it once and for all?

— Dysfunction in Springfield goes hand in hand with machine politics. And no one embodied machine politics more than former House Speaker and state Democratic Party chief Michael Madigan, now facing trial on racketeering charges. Madigan is Exhibit A when it comes to why Illinois desperately needs ethics reform that goes far beyond lip service measures. Corruption poisons every aspect of governance — from sound management and leadership to fiscal responsibility to most of all, the sanctity of public trust. Every election season, candidates hawk the abstract notion of ethics reform and then fail to follow through once they’re in office.

Candidate X, will you be part of the solution on ethics reform, or part of the problem?

There are myriad other issues to query Illinois candidates about, and it’s obvious that each office seeker’s viewpoint as it relates to the seismic Supreme Court draft opinion on Roe v. Wade will be foremost on the minds of voters — on both sides of the issue.

Our goal isn’t to give voters a road map on what to ask or how to ask it. Our main message is this. Ask questions. Read up. Get engaged in the process. Too much is at stake to be passive about something as crucial as deciding who represents us in government.

Join the discussion on Twitter @chitribopinions and on Facebook.

Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.