Prairie State Wire

Kanye West was seen as a spoiler candidate. 

The rapper was thought to be positioned to siphon votes from Joe Biden and then the state of Illinois sank his chances by invalidating around 50 percent of his petition’s signatures. 

“How did Democrats kick @kanyewest off the ballot in his home state?” Attorney Robert Barnes said in a tweet. “By demanding a strict signature match. Guess what rate of signatures were rejected by the election officials? Over half. Yet the signatures magically match for the general election?”

When West petitioned to be on the presidential ballot for the state in August, Illinois election officials found that of the 3,128 signatures he provided, 1,900 of them were invalid, meaning he was short a little more than 1,200 signatures. 

The election officials did not provide a reason for tossing the signatures, but the reasons signatures are typically ineligible are because they are fake names and addresses, ineligible voters or illegible signatures.

West had provided $30,000 to the state to be included on the presidential ballot.

Also of note, a Democrat elections judge noted many irregularities in Cook County during the election.

Ina Bochian served as a primary election judge and early voting election judge and told West Cook News that she saw several issues occur in the county and she was fearful after telling authorities.

“One of the irregularities I witnessed at the Cicero Facility was that multiple ballots were damaged, or ‘cut’ by envelope-opening machines,” Bochian said to the news media. “These ‘cut’ ballots could not be processed through the optical scanner, so I was instructed to put the damaged ballots in a pile labeled ‘REMAKE’.” 

Bochian noticed more Republican ballots were cut than Democratic ones. She also noticed in several Republican-leaning localities, there would be 20 random Biden-only votes that would appear.

Bochian also saw mail-in ballots with no postmark arriving at the facility and those ballots were either blank, had all races marked except the presidential race or would have the judge's ballot but not the political candidate's ballot, which she felt was unusual.