South Cook News

State Rep. Amy Grant (R-Wheaton) is calling on the state to preserve fair and free elections, expressing her concern that a collection of laws passed by the General Assembly in May lacks basic safeguards even as the state has yet to fully address errors in the registration system.

Illinois uses an Automatic Voter Registration system, which has had numerous problems in recent months, according to the Illinois House Republicans Caucus Blog. They include the near-miss on the accidental registrations of 4,700 16-year-olds; the incorrect registration of 545 non-citizens as voters – at least one of whom voted in an election; and the mis-coding of 1,152 eligible voters as non-voters.

Despite those problems, Grant told the Leading Voices podcast that calls to suspend the system while the problems were investigated were ignored by Democrat lawmakers, who instead took steps that could make fraud or errors even more likely.

Grant called out SB 1863, under which mail-in ballots applications will be sent out to addresses that have not been re-verified since 2018. Yet, there is no requirement to scrub voter rolls of deceased individuals or to verify if voters have changed their address or even left the state.

The law also lacks any specifications for safeguarding boxes that it permits county clerks to leave in unsecured areas for those who wish to drop off their ballots, she said in the post. 

“There were no provisions regarding structural requirements for these boxes, which leaves these receptacles wide open for tampering and theft,” she stated.

When asked what she considers is an acceptable margin of error in conducting elections, Grant said there isn’t one.

“Our right to free and fair elections is one of our most basic rights,” Grant said. “Any error at all undermines our system of democracy.”