A hastily slapped together law encouraging Illinois citizens to vote by mail in 2020, in the name of fighting COVID-19, will open the door to fraud and cheating to aid the Democratic Party, a new lawsuit filed by Cook County Republicans argues.
On Aug. 10, the Cook County Republican Party filed suit in Chicago federal court against Gov. JB Pritzker and other election officials in Springfield and Chicago, accusing them of violating Illinois voters’ constitutional rights, disenfranchising Republican voters and denying all Illinois citizens the right to cast secret ballots.
Pritzker and state lawmakers violated these rights “by signing into law a partisan voting scheme that is designed to harvest Democratic ballots, dilute Republican ballots, and, if the election still doesn’t turn out the way he (Pritzker) wants it, to generate enough Democratic ballots after election day to sway the result,” the complaint alleged.
The complaint centers on the state’s enactment of the legislation known as SB 1863 this spring during the rapid COVID-19 shortened session of the Democrat-dominated Illinois General Assembly.
The law rewrote Illinois election rules. While Illinois voters already had the right to request a ballot to vote by mail, the law required county clerks throughout the state to mail applications for a mail-in ballot to everyone who has voted in the state since 2018.
It also made Election Day a state holiday for all public employees and school students in Illinois.
While other states, such as Oregon, have successfully conducted elections by mail for many years, the lawsuit asserts that was accomplished by gradually expanding and fine-tuning the process over the course of decades to ensure vote integrity.
By contrast, the lawsuit said, Illinois’ process is “will open the door to voter fraud,” by creating “a partisan voting scheme that is designed to directly disenfranchise voters disfavored by Pritzker, to dilute the votes of those disfavored by Pritzker, and to violate the secrecy of voting in Illinois.”
To begin, the lawsuit asserted, Illinois’ penchant for and history of “inept” state and local government, combined with the rushed implementation of a massive vote-by-mail system would result in an election that wouldn’t “work any more smoothly than a variety of projects Illinois has stumbled through in recent years.”
The complaint noted that New York City’s attempt to rush a vote-by-mail system in June resulted in an election in which “a staggering 21% of the votes cast were not counted” in the New York City Democratic presidential primary election.
The lawsuit pointed to examples in Illinois in which election officials, under earlier attempts to expand voter registration, improperly registered thousands of ineligible 16-year-olds and registered 545 “possible non-citizens” to vote.
Further, the lawsuit pointed out, Illinois’ current state government under Pritzker has also struggled to meet the demand for unemployment assistance, exacerbated by Pritzker’s economic lockdown orders this spring, and has failed to address alleged rampant unemployment assistance fraud.
“The sum of this incompetence from the leaders of state government shows that Illinois is woefully unprepared to implement a vote-by-mail system this year,” the complaint said.
Beyond alleged incompetence, the lawsuit further asserts the vote-by-mail program “will breed corruption” and “criminal activity.”
Particularly, the lawsuit targets the practice of ballot harvesting. Under this process, political operatives will go door to door, collecting ballots, ostensibly to turn them in to be counted. In practice, however, the lawsuit asserts this will result in Democratic ballots being turned in, and Republican ballots being discarded.
They noted Republicans in North Carolina were recently caught engaging in such partisan tricks in a congressional race, in which the results were overturned.
They noted the Illinois law doesn’t require a “vote by mail” to actually be mailed. Under the Illinois law, the ballot can be submitted by anyone.
The lawsuit warns that election officials, such as Democratic Cook County Clerk Karen Yarbrough, “will blur the lines between their political and official positions in an effort to confuse voters about official government communications, as they have in past elections, and their efforts will be much more successful with so many voters-by-mail subject to their solicitations.”
And the Democratic Party will overflow with potential ballot harvesters, the lawsuit asserts, because state and local government workers, who are overwhelmingly Democratic and renowned for volunteering for the Democratic Party, will be given the day off work.
“Allowing overwhelmingly Democratic public sector employees the day off to collect ballots, while private sector employees will be at work, will dilute the votes of the Republican Party,” the lawsuit claims.
Further, the lawsuit said, voter fraud will be enabled by other provisions in the law, which make it much harder to invalidate potentially fraudulent ballots and which make it easier for political operatives to impersonate other registered voters.
The lawsuit asserts Illinois vote by mail violates voters’ First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
It asks the court to block Pritzker and the state from following through on the vote by mail “scheme.”
The Cook County Republicans are represented in the action by attorneys Brian K. Kelsey and James J. McQuaid, of the Liberty Justice Center, of Chicago.