At the end of a bitterly fought gubernatorial campaign, it has come down to this: a tale of two houses.

That’s right. The two leading candidates — Democrat J.B. Pritzker and Republican incumbent Bruce Rauner — have conducted such issues-free campaigns that the election could be determined more by voters’ views on how each candidate handled his “house” situation than by any ideas Rauner or Pritzker championed during the race.

For Rauner, the residence in question is the Illinois Veterans Home in Quincy, where questions whirl about how the Rauner administration handled a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak connected to 14 resident deaths since 2015.

For Pritzker, questions persist about property tax breaks and refunds exceeding $330,000, made possible by removing the toilets from his Gold Coast mansion, rendering that house uninhabitable.

Read the rest at chicagotribune.com.

David Greising is the president and chief executive of the Better Government Association, joining the BGA in 2018. For nearly a century, the BGA has fought for honest and effective government through investigative journalism and policy advocacy.

Greising’s career started at the City News Bureau of Chicago, with stops at the Chicago Sun-Times, Business Week magazine, the Chicago Tribune and Reuters. He was a co-founder of the Chicago News Cooperative and worked briefly as a consultant to World Business Chicago. Today, Greising writes on government issues in regular columns for the Tribune and Crain’s Chicago Business.

Under Greising’s leadership, the BGA has played a key role in uncovering public corruption amidst the wide-ranging federal probe, starting with an in-depth report about Ald. Ed Burke’s conflicts of interest before the federal charges against Burke. The BGA also has exposed waste and fraud at O’Hare and the proliferation of corruption and poverty into Dolton, Lyons and other Chicago suburbs. The BGA’s policy team has led calls for ethics reform in Chicago’s City Council and in state government.