Prairie State Wire

Illinois GOP Chairman Don Tracy said the party is focusing on securing the 2022 elections in the state.

Tracy is committed to ensuring that the 2022 elections in Illinois are honest and fair.

“Three steps to providing true election security in Illinois: No. 1) Cleanup voter rolls to discourage ballot stuffing," Tracy said. "Recently, a Texas woman and Arizona mayor were convicted of 2020 ballot stuffing. No. 2) Put as many eyes and ears as we can on all facets of the election process this year to dissuade anyone from thinking of cheating the system. 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 across the state. Statewide, we need 3,000 to 4,000 election judges, 1,000 poll watchers and 400 to 500 lawyers on standby. Please sign up if you are interested in helping or call your local Republican leader. No. 3) And then once we win in November, we actually pass laws that provide true long-lasting security to our elections. Reforms like those proposed by Republican legislators: Requiring voter photo ID (House Bill 2599), faster removal of voters from rolls who move to another district (House Bill 1920), standardize removal of deceased voters from rolls (House Bill 2598), improved verification of vote-by-mail signatures (House Bill 2600) and statewide vote-by-mail reporting system (House Bill 2601).”

Last year, state senator and gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey sponsored voter integrity legislation in Illinois, Prairie State Wire reported. 

He said in a tweet, “We must work to improve and restore confidence in our elections moving forward.” 

Included in the proposed bill are, an annual cleaning of voter rolls in every county, a 1% random audit of signatures and ballots for each election and mandatory voter ID while making state IDs free for those who do not have one. In DuPage County, election integrity was a big issue because former county auditor Bob Grogan claimed that voter fraud cost him his election. He said there were irregularities and that his team found unopened ballots that could have changed the result of the election. Bailey’s proposed legislation would seek to prevent situations like these.

Tracy told the party in a press release to put the 2020 election behind them and focus on 2022, according to Prairie State Wire. He said Republicans believe that “legal voting should be easy, and illegal voting should be hard.” Republicans in Illinois have every reason to feel that the Democrats use their super-majority to subvert them. For decades, Democrats have gerrymandered seats to gain as many as possible. A fair maps referendum was projected to pass in 2016, but it was removed from the ballot by the Illinois Supreme Court. The decision was written by Justice Thomas Kilbride, who was heavily backed by former House Speaker Michael Madigan in what many consider a gerrymandered district.

Gerrymandering is something that both parties do, and a certain level of it is expected because politicians are drawing the Congressional maps. But “Democrats really went to town with gerrymanders of their own in states they controlled,” Vox stated. Vox further reported that Illinois Democrats removed four Republican-leaning Congressional Districts while they created three Democrat-leaning districts. Fourteen out of Illinois’ 17 congressional districts will lean Democrat. However, some of these seats could go Republican in a wave election cycle.

The old saying that Chicagoans “vote early and often” certainly has its roots in reality. Although many officials say that voter fraud no longer happens in Chicago, former President Donald Trump begged to differ. However, the history of voter fraud in the city is interesting. In 1928, many people thought that Republicans under Mayor William Thompson operated “the greatest political machine ever fashioned in Cook County,” according to an April 12, 1928 Chicago Tribune story. However, in 1931, Democrat Mayor Anton Cermak became the first in an unbroken line of Democrat mayors, and this was the beginning of the infamous “Democratic Machine,” according to DNAinfo. It made sure the right candidates were in office by whatever means necessary. 

Not only did politicians cheat to win, but they cheated to win major victories so they could have a “mandate.” According to Bob Crawford, a longtime journalist who covered city politics for WBBM-AM, Cermak created the machine, but Richard J. Daley made it “an art form.” The machine used all kinds of nefarious tactics to make sure their candidates won including, rigging voter rolls, registering dead voters from cemetery tombstones, bribing voters, pretending to be Republican poll watchers and “helping” nursing home residents vote. 

Most famously, the Chicago Machine helped John Kennedy get elected in 1960. Kennedy carried Illinois by 9,000 votes and Cook County by 450,000 votes. This Cook County number was suspicious, and many speculated it was of the machine’s making. With Daley’s death in 1976 and the passage of a city Freedom of Information law in 1983, the machine began to lose power. With new laws and more sets of eyes watching Chicago’s elections, voting often is a relic of the past.