Illinois county clerks are preparing for mail voting amid continued attacks, changes

Voting by mail isn’t new. The United States first implemented the practice on a large scale when President Abraham Lincoln insisted on holding the 1864 election and Union soldiers were far from their polling places.

Since the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become an even more popular voting method and one of the most scrutinized. In that election, a third of votes counted in Illinois were by mail. Matt Dietrich, the spokesperson for the Illinois State Board of Elections, said it was the first time many Illinoisans had taken advantage of mail-in ballots.

But as 43% of Americans voted by mail in 2020, according to the Census Bureau, it had the parallel consequence of delaying the timeline for ballot counting in several states. Six years after President Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, he still claims the election was rigged and that late-arriving mail-in ballots were fraudulent or shouldn’t have been counted.

Nonetheless, it remains a popular method, especially in Illinois, where the process of ensuring voter confidence in mail voting and elections generally falls upon county clerks. In 2024, more than 18% of voters cast their ballot by mail, according to information from the Illinois State Board of Elections. In 2016, that number was 6.5%.

Many county clerks told Capitol News Illinois they’ve developed strategies to boost confidence in voting by mail by relying on transparency, communication and having people experience the process.

“In Illinois, we probably have been doing vote-by-mail longer than most Midwestern states,” Don Gray, the Republican Sangamon County Clerk, said in an interview.

Because of how long it’s been happening, he said the state’s process is well established, and people’s faith grows with the more experience they have with the voting method.

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Ahead of this year’s elections, the U.S. Postal Service is making changes that could alter mail voting procedures, Congress is considering the SAVE America Act to tighten voter ID guidelines and exercise more federal control over voter rolls, and the U.S. Supreme Court is considering whether ballots should be counted if they arrive after Election Day.

Illinois officials say they’re ready to handle those changes.

The vote-by-mail experience in Illinois: confidence

In Illinois, anyone who wants to vote by mail simply has to request a vote-by-mail application from their county’s election office, fill it out and send it back. Then voters wait to receive a ballot in the mail, fill it out and follow the instructions about how to return it.

Illinois implemented no-excuse mail voting in 2009 and set up a system for permanent mail voting in 2021, which allows voters to sign up to receive ballots without having to request them every time an election comes around.

Pew Research Center polling from 2025 shows Americans still support mail voting, although Republican support has decreased since 2021. The poll showed support for mail-in voting was higher in states where it’s more common. Seven states now have universal mail-in voting, meaning all voters receive ballots in the mail regardless of whether they asked for them.

According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, 32 countries or territories allow some form of mail-in voting, usually called “postal voting.” Europe has the largest number of countries that allow voters to cast a ballot using the postal service.

“It is not my experience that there is some vulnerability in systemic or large, wide fraud on just a mail program, because I know how we operate and we do it well,” Gray said.

Like other clerks, Gray said he practices full transparency by inviting people to observe how different steps are taken — from how to request a ballot, to receiving it and turning it back in to the clerk’s office, and how it’s processed and counted.

“The more you can expose how you operate, the greater trust and confidence you’ll have in your jurisdiction,” he said.

In Sangamon County, the number of people who vote by mail has increased and so has the number of people registering in the permanent program. Because of that, Gray thinks voters understand the process better.

“And I think it’s going to be kind of the wave of the future,” he said. “It’s one of those pieces that when you engage it and you use it, and you realize how well we do it and how secure it really is, you think to yourself, ‘Why haven’t I been doing this all along?’”

The number of people signing up for the program has grown in several areas of the state.

When Democratic Champaign County Clerk Aaron Ammons took office in 2018, he said only 7,000-8,000 people used mail-in voting, but now the permanent vote-by-mail list has grown to almost 20,000.

“So there’s a tremendous increase, but I have been very vigilant about that,” he said. “I’ve been very outspoken as an advocate for vote by mail.”

Ammons has done that in part by using local TV, radio and newspapers and providing weekly updates about the process through social media and the county clerk’s website.

A similar story has played out in Tazewell County. Though the number of people voting by mail has decreased slightly following the pandemic, it’s still about a quarter of the votes cast. Half of voters still vote on Election Day, and another one-fourth do it early, but in person.

“What we’re hearing is that our local folks have confidence,” Republican Tazewell County Clerk John Ackerman said. “More questions (are) about the post office. Will it be delivered in a timely manner? How can we guarantee that our ballot is actually there?”

Ballot tracking

Those questions are answered by ballot tracking, which allows people to keep tabs on their ballot and know when it arrives at the election office. Multiple clerks said it was another major piece of confidence in mail voting.

“That allows them (voters) to engage in the process, rather than just assume it’s there,” Ackerman said.

The Tazewell clerk’s office uses a St. Louis-based vendor called KNOWiNK to handle their mail-in ballots, and Ackerman said the ballot tracking was one of the main reasons why they switched from their previous system. KNOWiNK is a nationally recognized company that was set up by former election officials.

The company also has materials for vote-by-mail reminder cards and other bulk mail for clerks to send to voters.

Gray called the tracking system a “beautiful” way to make elections transparent and to boost confidence.

“You know when you put your ballot in the box, right? Hold us accountable, make sure that we got it and that your vote has been validated and counted,” he said.

Current challenges and solutions

As the first mid-term of Trump’s second term looms in November, clerks are navigating a few new developments that could shake faith in the vote-by-mail process.

The United States Postal Service updated language regarding postmarking mail, including ballots. In a January news conference, a bipartisan group of county clerks warned that the new rule could alter when a postmark is applied and what it means for ballot eligibility.

Illinois accepts ballots up to two weeks after an election, as long as the ballot is postmarked by Election Day. The new rule means people who mail their ballots on or a few days before Election Day risk having their ballots rejected, clerks warned.

The March primaries were the first elections under the new rules, and Ackerman said the rule change didn’t have as big an effect on mail-in voting as the clerk’s office feared it would.

“I think that is due to the fact that we got information out,” he said.

Before the primaries, the Illinois Association of County Clerks and Recorders met to discuss how to handle the change and to spread the word about it. There, Ackerman said he planned to put cards with information about the new rules in the vote-by-mail packets Tazewell County voters were sent before the primaries. Those packets also included a voter’s ballot, return envelope and instructions for filling out the ballot and turning it in.

In Sangamon County, 7,317 mail-in ballots were returned, and only four were rejected for having a late postmark. Williamson County had 1,206 mail-in ballots returned and 18 rejected because of the late postmark. In Tazewell County, 15 mail-in ballots out of 2,933 were rejected because they were postmarked one or two days after March 17.

“There shouldn’t be ballots that aren’t counted, period,” Ackerman said. “The goal is to have every single ballot counted. In generalized numbers, that doesn’t mean a lot, but to those 15 individuals I’m sure that is a big problem.”

Another challenge could come from the U.S. Supreme Court as it considers whether states should be able to count ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive later. A decision in the case is expected sometime before June 30, and it could lead to Illinois having to adjust how it collects mail-in ballots.

The state elections board is already planning for the ruling and how to communicate new information to voters, Dietrich said. Any time there’s a big change to how elections are conducted, he said, there’s a perception that voting is complicated or that there’s something to worry about, and he wants to reassure voters that the state will make available all the information they need to know.

Misinformation about voting spreads, Democratic Champaign County Clerk Aaron Ammons said, because some people only engage when it’s time to vote for president or Congress.

“People are not always paying attention,” he said. “So they don’t see the information, or they digest misinformation as much as they do any accurate information.”

He said he asks election judges, both Republican and Democratic, to talk about their experience to help set the record straight. He also relies on local media to share new information. Ammons credits early education for how people in Champaign County adjusted to the postmark change for the primaries.

Ackerman said Tazewell County would handle a change to whether Illinois could accept ballots after the election the same way they managed the postmark change.

“We would have to proactively advertise that change to the public so that they knew to adjust their clocks,” he said. That would mean telling people to mail their ballots at least a week before Election Day.

When reassuring voters, Ackerman said, it helps to separate what’s going on in Illinois from what happens in other states or at the federal level.

“All I can do is try to make sure that they are confident in their vote, their elections here,” he said. “That’s about the limits of where I’m at.”

Still, Ackerman noted that interest in voting by mail and voting early in person continues to increase, especially as people experience the process and realize it’s easy and secure.

“We went from handling a couple hundred ballots for vote-by-mail to having a vote-by-mail list now that’s, I believe it’s sitting at about 12,000,” he said.

President continues to ramp up rhetoric

It took four days to call the 2020 race for due to how long it took to count votes in key swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia. That delay opened the door for conspiracy theories about the election.

Dietrich said after 2020 he started getting many more messages and Freedom of Information Act requests for documents related to the election, but in his experience, once people try voting by mail, their doubts about it fade.

“It is very hard to explain to someone who ­— if they believe that voting by mail is just rife with fraud and that it’s so easy to get other voters’ ballots and vote them — if they haven’t seen how it works, it’s hard to explain why that’s not the process,” he said.

Since 2020, county clerks have developed strategies to boost confidence in voting by mail by relying on transparency, communication and having people experience the process.

Dietrich said he thinks people’s faith in vote-by-mail has increased a lot over the years, based on the higher numbers of people using that method.

“I think some of those who were skeptical, probably in the 2020 cycle, probably saw that it is, number one, convenient for you, but number two, that it is secure,” he said.

But even as they work to build trust, Trump has continued to criticize mail-in voting, even though records and reporting show that he frequently uses it, including in the 2026 Florida special elections and in 2020.

On March 31, Trump signed an executive order that would delegate responsibility for determining who can vote by mail to the United States Postal Service. The order instructs the USPS to refuse to deliver a ballot to anyone not on a newly created federal mail voter list which would be established after receiving voter roll data from every state.

Illinois is one of 23 states that is challenging it in court along with voting rights groups, and the Department of Justice on May 1 told a judge it has not acted on the order to restrict mail-in-voting.

Cover Image: A vote-by-mail drop box is pictured in Sangamon County, blocks away from the Illinois State Capitol. (Capitol News Illinois photo by Jerry Nowicki)

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.