Prairie State Wire

Illinois Conservative Union Chairwoman Carol Davis is expressing concern over potential election fraud at the county level and is calling on ordinary people to get engaged.

Davis claims that most election fraud occurs at the local level and has urged the public to become more active in the electoral process to ensure fairness and transparency. 

"It’s not usually a statewide thing," Davis said. "You know, a state can have the best election laws in the country. But if the local election authority that’s supposed to implement those laws decides to disregard the law or take shortcuts or just doesn’t know the law, that’s where the elections are going off the rails.”

Davis also boasted about the collaboration between the Illinois Conservative Union and different county GOP organizations in working toward election trust.

"The Illinois Conservative Union, for the first time in decades, we’ve got really a great coalition built around the state where we’re working together with different organizations and different county GOP organizations just to coordinate our efforts," Davis said. "So that is a huge plus. That is, I think, working well to date. I think our coalition alone has trained about 3,000 poll watchers all across the state. And, you know, there are other local GOP organizations who are doing that also. But we’re just trying to get more coordinated with our efforts." 

This year has been different for hiring election judges and poll watchers after the GOP's emphasis on election integrity for this election. Illinois GOP Chairman Don Tracy said that "Election integrity has not just been an issue since the election of 2020, but because of the historic cemetery turnout in Illinois it has been an issue here in Illinois for a long, long time." 

However, Illinois State Board of Elections spokesman Matt Dietrich said that "there is no evidence" of widespread voter fraud since the Board's inception in 1970. According to the Chicago Tribune, the issue of election integrity presents a bit of an issue for gubernatorial candidate Sen. Darren Bailey (R-Louisville) because he has encouraged his voters to vote early and vote by mail despite former President Trump saying these are avenues of voter fraud. 

Many Republicans are pointing to the ballot misprint issue in Schuyler County, but the Tribune says that right now, there is no evidence election fraud caused the misprint. 

According to West Central Reporter, U.S. Senate candidate Kathy Salvi (R) is demanding answers from Schuyler County Clerk Mindy D. Garrett after the county sent out early ballots with Peggy Hubbard as Tammy Duckworth's opponent. However, Hubbard lost the GOP primary to Salvi. State Rep. Brad Halbrook (R-Shelbyville) expressed that he has "never seen an error of this magnitude on a ballot. This is a serious mistake." He went on to say there needs to be a "viable solution" to correct this error.

While Halbrook believes the error was not intentional "but it is a grievous error nonetheless," Chambana Sun reported. Halbrook added that every voter who voted on the mistaken ballot needs to be given the opportunity to vote on a clean, mistake-free ballot. He also said that there needs to be a viable solution to correct this error because there may be close local elections that could be affected if certain ballots are deemed invalid. 

Bailey and the state GOP have teamed up with Davis to combat voter fraud in the state. Davis said that Illinois Democrats have exported their methods of swinging elections across the country. Across the state and country, Davis is encouraging people to become election judges and poll watchers, which is a strategy that she said helped Glenn Youngkin to victory in the Virginia governor's race. She is also encouraging that people submit FOIA requests to their local election authority to see how exactly their elections are being run. Davis is encouraging people to get involved in their elections to combat election irregularities. 

Davis is also with FreedomWorks Election Protection and has noted that what they are doing at the coalition is interesting because of what they have discovered in the many years they have been working on election integrity in Illinois. She said, "that kind of goes hand in hand with what I’m seeing across the nation in my role as the national director for FreedomWorks Election Protection Initiative, So in that role, I’ve been fortunate to be in every battleground state – some of them two or three times just last year – and seeing the same types of problems."