Prairie State Wire

Illinois GOP chairman Don Tracy is stressing the importance of election integrity in this year’s elections. 

“We have made election security the state party’s top priority going into the fall,” Tracy said in his weekly memo. "We will be spending considerable resources to recruit, train and manage poll watchers, election judges and election lawyers — all of whom will be our eyes and ears to provide accountability at the ground level in polling places in every precinct. In that endeavor, we need 3,000 to 4,000 election judges and 1,000 poll watchers statewide to effectively provide election oversight.” 

Election integrity issues already arose in McLean County where five GOP board members were removed from the ballot through technical challenges brought by Democrats, according to the McLean County Times.

“[N]ot numbering a handful of petition pages was deemed sufficient reason by the circuit court judge to remove all five candidates from the ballot," Connie Beard, chairman of the McLean County Republicans, said. "Nothing was gained by this action. Time and tax dollars spent to remove candidates was such a waste as there are options available to the candidates and our Republican Party to make sure they are still on the ballot in November." 

Tracy is encouraging the public to get involved in election integrity. 

"The 2020 election is over," Tracy said in a press release. "This is about ensuring the 2022 election is secure and free of uncertainty. As Republicans, we believe legal voting should be easy, and illegal voting should be hard. Democrats seem only to want voting to be easy regardless of the potential for fraud.”

The concern over the subversion of the minority party in Illinois by Democrats is a very real one. Democrats have maintained control of the state for decades through gerrymandering tactics that have rendered all but a handful of seats anti-competitive, according to Vox.

A fair maps referendum was projected to pass in the state in 2016, but was removed from the ballot in an opinion authored by former Illinois Supreme Court Justice Thomas Kilbride, the Cook County Record reported. He was heavily supported by former House Speaker Michael Madigan who has been indicted on 22 counts of corruption. Following the design by Kilbride, he became the first state Supreme Court justice to lose retainment. Observers have noted the Supreme Court of Illinois itself has been inflicted by gerrymandering for the past 60 years.

Vote tampering and blatant fraud have historically been a problem in Chicago, DNAinfo reported. John F. Kennedy won Illinois by only 9,000 votes in 1960, with reportedly extraordinary numbers of votes cast in Chicago, including names of the deceased.

Historic journalism about Chicago's history of voter fraud has been compiled by the New York University Libraries. During Madigan's second year in power, 37 persons in Chicago were prosecuted for vote manipulation during the 1972 election cycle.