By Joe O’Donnell
On Nov. 4, voters in 380 suburban Cook County precincts will be guided at the polls by politically imbalanced teams of election judges, shows a Chicago Reporter analysis of data from the Cook County Clerk’s Office.
According to Article 13 of the Illinois election code, a polling place in each precinct is supposed to have five election judges affiliated with two leading political parties. Three of the judges must come from the precinct’s leading political party whose gubernatorial candidates received a majority of votes in the last three gubernatorial elections, while two must be of the other party. In precincts where the clerk’s office determines that three judges are sufficient, two must come from the leading party.
The Reporter analysis shows that, in 380 of 2,290 suburban precincts, election judges from one party outnumbered the others by two or more. In another 338 precincts—where the clerk’s office has assigned two, four or six judges, instead of five—two parties have the same number of judges represented.
Among the 149 precincts in west suburban Proviso Township, for example, 51 have a discrepancy of more than one judge between the two parties. In 11 of the precincts, the Republican Party has no representation among the judges chosen.
In suburban Cook County, election judges are selected by the clerk’s office from lists composed by township committeemen from Republican and Democratic parties. Jan Kralovec, director of elections for the clerk’s office, explained that a shortage of names supplied by committeemen often leaves her office to fill the vacancies without paying too much consideration to party affiliation. “We do our best to respect party division, but our primary goal is to make sure we have enough judges to run a fair election,” she said. “Party is secondary.”
Dan White, executive director of the Illinois State Board of Elections, said he trusts the judgment of the clerk’s office in its selections. “The county clerk’s office is fully aware of the provisions of the election code,” he said. “It is in their discretion to fill vacancies as they see fit.” In addition, White noted that judges understand their responsibility to administer a fair election and swear to uphold the provisions of the state.
Jay Stewart, executive director of the Chicago-based Better Government Association, said that, while the clerk’s office seems to be trying to uphold the letter of the law, it is the spirit of the law being violated when members of one party serve as a judge of the opposition party. “This shows you the limits of the current electoral system,” he said. “Obviously, the reason the legislature wrote the law that way is to ensure the members of the minority party aren’t outgunned [at the polls].”
The Board of Election Commissioners for the City of Chicago could not provide the Reporter with data on Chicago election judges by the press time.
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