As early voting begins, officials seek to reassure public about election security, integrity

SPRINGFIELD — With early in-person and mail-in voting now underway in Illinois, state and local election officials insisted Friday that the state’s voting system is being run fairly and accurately.

Sangamon County Clerk Don Gray and Illinois State Board of Elections spokesman Matt Dietrich told a Springfield audience not to buy into false reports that the system is vulnerable to widespread fraud or that voter rolls can be hacked or manipulated.

“We can’t allow that disinformation to permeate our systems here, or that form of terrorism to erode our greatest beacon of what we do — electing our leaders,” Gray said. “I encourage all of you to get involved. Become an election judge. See what it is that we do. See how we operate.”

Gray and Dietrich were the featured speakers at a forum sponsored by the Citizens Club of Springfield. It was billed as an effort to address concerns that have been raised in recent years about the integrity and security of elections in the United States.

Much of the recent criticism of the electoral process has come directly from the White House where President Donald Trump has tried to exert more federal control over elections, particularly mail-in voting.

Federal lawsuits

For more than a year, Illinois and at least 29 other states have been embroiled in litigation over the Trump administration’s efforts to gain access to the states’ complete, unredacted voter registration databases that include sensitive personal information such as dates of birth, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.

The Trump administration has said it needs the data to determine whether states are properly maintaining their voter rolls, including purging the rolls of non-U.S. citizens and other people ineligible to vote. But Illinois has argued the administration has no statutory authority to demand the data while state law prohibits election officials from releasing it.

“We’ve won at the trial court level,” Dietrich said, referring to a July 31 federal court ruling. “But those cases are going on. There are still five more that are out there. So far, the states have prevailed in 25 of those cases. That’s going to go on for a while. I foresee that that will end up at some point before the Supreme Court.”

Illinois was also part of a successful multistate lawsuit to block the administration’s attempt to put the U.S. Postal Service in charge of regulating the pickup and delivery of mail ballots.

Because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the states’ favor in that case, Gray said local election authorities throughout Illinois were able to mail out ballots to people who had requested them on Thursday, the official start of early voting in Illinois.

“If the guidelines were upheld, we’d have to reprint all our envelopes,” he said. “It would take weeks for us to do that. They’d have to restuff all of the materials to get them in. So the timing was terrible for us to do this.”

Election safeguards

Despite Trump’s attempts to cast doubt over vote-by-mail systems, Gray said mail balloting has been growing “by leaps and bounds” in recent years and predicted that mail-in votes could account for as much as one-third of all votes cast in the Nov. 3 election.

Gray and Dietrich also tried to put to rest concerns that the state does not properly check the identity of people registering to vote.

Gray said Illinois provides multiple ways for people to register. Many people do it when applying for or renewing their driver’s license or state identification card, but they can also do it through an online portal on the State Board of Elections’ website or by filling out a paper form that can be delivered to their local election office.

Illinois requires applicants to show two forms of identification, at least one of which must show their current home address. That can include a driver’s license, state ID card, bank statement, a residence contract or lease, or a utility bill. The application also asks for the last four digits of the person’s Social Security number and their date of birth.

No matter how a person submits their application, Gray said, it eventually gets sent to the local election authority where officials verify all the information provided.

“When it comes back to the election authority, we look up those driver’s licenses into a portal of secretary of state to ensure it’s active, it’s legitimate, it’s the person that’s presenting themselves and at the address that they request,” he said. “We also do the same with the last four digits of your Social Security number with the Social Security Administration. So we’re doing a lot of upfront vetting all the time through those means to ensure that you are who you are.”

And while Illinois does not require voters to show identification at the polls to cast a ballot, Gray and Dietrich said it would be extremely difficult for anyone to vote under someone else’s name.

“You would have to know the voter’s name and address for one,” Dietrich said. “You’d also have to have a pretty good idea of what their signature is. But if impersonation was happening at any volume, even if it was just a few dozen, eventually the real voter is going to show up in their polling place and try to get their ballot. The election judge will say, ‘Well, you already voted. We have this here,’ and the legitimate voter is going to say, ‘Well, I didn’t vote.’ That’s going to start an investigation.”

Dietrich also discussed cybersecurity measures that have been put in place since a highly-publicized attempt in 2016 by Russian agents to hack into the state’s voter registration database as part of a broader attempt to interfere in that year’s U.S. elections.

In response, he said, Illinois used a $13 million federal grant and state matching funds to hire “cyber navigators” who were deployed across the state to train local election authorities on cyber security.

“Probably the biggest thing that they did in that first year was they put all 108 local election authorities onto the Illinois Century Network, which is the state of Illinois’ private internet that state government uses to send data within an intra-agency communication,” Dietrich said. “So your voter data is never being put onto the public internet to come to us.”

More information about how to vote by mail or cast an early in-person ballot is available from the State Board of Elections or local election authorities.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.