abc 7 news
October 26, 2010 (CHICAGO) (WLS) --This year marks the first Illinois election that any registered voter can cast their ballot by mail, no excuses necessary. Even as the deadline for those ballots to be postmarked nears, problems are brewing.
An Illinois county election official is telling the ABC 7 I-Team thatthousands -- potentially hundreds of thousands -- of voters who are expecting a ballot sent to them by mail may be disenfranchised.
Chicagoan Rosia Carter is one of 404,000 registered Illinois voters who recently received vote-by-mail requests that were sent by the Illinois Democratic Coordinated Campaign.
"By the time I filed it out and sent it in, my vote would not get counted," Carter said.She and others called the I-Team when they noticed the return address is not their local election official but instead a PO box for the organization. IDCC officials claim they are entering ballot request information into their own database before sending the mailings on to election authorities who then mail voters the ballot.
The Lake County clerk received a shipment of 500 ballot requests from the IDCC Tuesday. By law, her office has two days to process the ballot requests.
The problem is, Thursday is the deadline for election officials to get the ballots out.
IDCC told the clerk that another 1,500 ballot requests are headed to her office, which, she says, may not give her enough time to process all the ballots, potentially disenfranchising voters.
"I called Mike Madigan," Carter said, "and they said 'We farmed out this job, here's their phone number,' and I said 'I don't want the number, that's your job to call.' "
Carter and others who contacted the I-Team are furious that their vote may also be thrown out because the IDCC put the registered voters' wrong birthdate on the form.
"My birthdate is wrong," said Carter. "That means it doesn't match the election board of commissioners' records."
The IDCC says that less that "1 percent of the ballot applications have been affected by the date-of-birth glitch and that a voter's birthday is not a required piece of personal data to request a ballot."
read the rest here.
Replies