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Zack Smith, a legal fellow with the Heritage Foundation,
reviewed election law in all 50 states on a variety of issues.
“And we ranked them based on how well we thought they were doing
to make sure their elections are safe and secure and state
officials are making it easy to vote and hard to cheat,” Smith
told The Center Square. “Now, unfortunately, Illinois didn’t do
particularly well on this metric.”
Illinois landed at No. 40 overall with bad marks for no voter ID
laws, lax regulations on ballot harvesting and trafficking, and
same-day and automatic voter registration.
“Which when you combine that with Illinois’ lax voter
maintenance role procedures can make it much, much easier for
ineligible voters to slip through the cracks and be able to cast
a ballot,” Smith said.
Illinois scored 24 points out of 30 for accuracy of voter
registration lists, but scored no points in election litigation
procedures, restriction of private funding of election officials
or government agencies, as well as restriction of same-day
registration, automatic registration and verification of
citizenship.
“Illinois doesn’t have very robust restrictions against vote
harvesting and vote trafficking,” Smith said. “They don’t have
very good procedures in place to make sure that everyone who
votes is in fact a citizen.”
Overall, Illinois scored 49 out of 100 points.
In Madison County, NBC 5 St. Louis reports there’s a criminal
investigation underway there where an election judge noticed 39
mail-in ballots for the June primary election had similar
handwriting.
Smith didn’t have specifics on the case, but said the trope that
there’s no election fraud is false.
“Absentee ballots, they are one of the areas that are most rife
with fraud,” Smith said.
Heritage Foundation maintains a database that tracks fraud cases
across the country. It’s not exhaustive, Smith said, but there
are examples of voter fraud reports with dozens of cases
spanning back decades.
Illinois voters can vote early starting Sept. 29. That’s also
when local election officials will send voters who requested a
mail-in ballot their packets. Illinois expanded mail-in voting
to include the option of permanent mail-in voting by request.
The general midterm election is Nov. 8.
Greg Bishop reports on Illinois government and other
issues for The Center Square. Bishop has years of award-winning
broadcast experience and hosts the WMAY Morning Newsfeed out of
Springfield.
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