(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Welcome to a special edition of In Focus on WSIU.

I'm Jennifer Fuller.

With the election coming up, there are a lot of rules, regulations, deadlines, and other information that voters need to know.

So we're talking about that in this episode with Matt Dietrich, who is a spokesperson for the Illinois State Board of Elections.

Matt, thanks for joining us.

- Good to be here Jennifer.

- Let's kind of get started with some of the things that are happening right now.

I know there's some deadlines coming up for voters who need to submit their voter registration information ahead of the November 8th election.

- Sure, and first I should point out, we always like to say that voter registration in Illinois does not close until the polls close on election day.

You can register to vote right up through the, through the close of the polls at 7:00 PM on November 8th.

Now, that being said, the easiest way to register to vote is by using our online voter registration portal.

Now, that does close, and it closes at the end of the day, Sunday, October 23rd.

So, you know, one second, 11:59:59 on Sunday is when that closes.

And you can access that by going to elections.il.gov.

And right there on our landing page, we have an the online registration form and it'll walk you through it.

And if you have an Illinois driver's license or an ID issued through the Secretary of State's office, you're eligible to register online.

So I'd encourage people, if you're not registered yet and you have a driver's license or a state ID, get on there and that's the easiest way to do it.

- When people come in to vote, I hear this question a lot, even when I go in to cast my own ballot, there are questions about what they need to bring and what they can bring.

Do they need to bring ID, for example, can they bring a sample ballot or notes so that they can refer to some research that they have done?

What are the rules there?

- You don't need to bring an ID.

Illinois is not a voter ID state.

When you sign, when you request your ballot from the election judge, you will sign for your ballot.

The election judge will then compare your signature to the signature on file with the election authority.

And the only reason you may would have to show ID would be if more than one election judge, and at least one election judge from either party believes that there is a reason to believe that your signature is not valid, or there is a question about your identity.

And again, you have to have election judges of both parties who agree before you can be asked to show ID.

So the, and obviously if you're going in to register at the same time, you'll want to take two pieces of ID, but Illinois is not a voter ID state.

So your signature serves as your ID.

- Let's get a little bit into the election judge system because I know there are, in some cases candidates saying that they're encouraging people to come out and watch the polls and watch for election integrity, potential issues that way.

The Attorney General's office, the State Board of Elections, have people that can go and keep an eye on voting locations.

So what's required in a polling place?

What training do those judges have and what's not allowed in those polling places?

- Sure well, let's talk about the two different groups of people that you'll probably encounter when you go to a polling place.

First are the election judges.

These are volunteers who go through a training course to learn basically how to run a polling place.

They're trained in what a, you know, what to do when a voter comes to the precinct and requests a ballot.

They learn how to use poll books to look up the voter to make sure they're registered.

They assist voters if they have any problems with their, with casting their ballot.

You may have cases in which, let's say a voter accidentally marks the wrong candidate, you know, or makes a stray mark on a ballot.

Then they would call an election judge over, and the judge could, would spoil that ballot.

In other words, take it, set it aside, mark it as voided and reissue the voter a new ballot and every single ballot that's handed out, whether it gets voted or whether it's in, you know, a few cases where they, where they're spoiled by the judges, those numbers are recorded and they have to match at the end of the day.

And all of those ballots are stored in very specific, there are very specific requirements for ballot handling and security.

So those are your election judges.

Those are the people that you'll see sitting at the table when you walk into the polling place.

And they are the ones who volunteer.

They show up at 5:00 AM to open the polling place, and they stay until the polling place is closed.

And they have to post a ballot report in a place visible to the public after the, after the polling place closes so you can see exactly how many people voted there, how many ballots were handed out, how many were spoiled, that sort of thing.

The other group that you're likely to see in a polling place are poll watchers.

Poll watchers are representatives of any candidate who is on the ballot can have poll watchers present.

The political parties are entitled to have poll workers in polling places.

There are registered civic groups who can register with us, and they can also register with individual county clerks, and they can certify poll watchers to be in polling places and observe.

Now, one thing to remember as a voter is that poll watchers are there to watch.

There are very strict rules about what they can and can't do.

They cannot interact with voters, They can't interact with election judges in terms of how the judges are working with voters.

In other words, a poll watcher couldn't step forward and say, I don't agree with that signature.

I want see ID from this voter.

Poll watchers aren't allowed to do that.

And one of the things that, we do some of the election judge training for some counties.

Some counties do their own judge training.

But, and in any case, one of the things that judges are taught is that they control those polling places.

And if poll watchers are operating outside of the bounds of what they're supposed to do, the election judges can have them removed from the polling place.

So that's one thing to remember.

So you may, you will encounter election judges, you may encounter poll watchers when you go to your polling place.

- What about people who come into the polling place, what rules do they have if they support a particular candidate or an issue?

I think a lot of people sometimes forget that there are strict rules about whether or not you can engage in election earing, I believe it's called.

- When you step within 100 feet of a voting location, and you'll see this when you go to vote, you'll see pylons generally, you step into what is referred to as a campaign free zone.

There is no election earing allowed within that 100 foot space.

And that applies not just to the campaigns who might try to hand out stickers or other things to, to encourage voters to vote for them.

But it also applies to the voters themselves.

If you're wearing a T-shirt with a candidate's name on it, an election judge will ask you to cover it up.

If you're wearing a hat with a campaign slogan or a candidate's name on it, you'll be asked to remove it.

You can't have that in the polling place.

Can't have it within 100 feet of a polling place.

We don't see, we don't really get reports of problems about those kind of things, but they do happen.

Voters are reminded and in some cases, you know, they've had to turn their shirt inside out, had to put on a jacket over it to cover up the candidate's name, had to remove their hat, take off a button if you're wearing a campaign button, can't have any of that kind of thing within a hundred feet of where the voting is going on.

- A lot of people are spending a lot of time talking about election integrity and election security.

So if they do run into a problem, if a voter goes into a polling place and they think that someone is electioneering or that a poll watcher is engaging perhaps more than they should, what should they do?

Who should they call or where's the recourse there?

- Well, number one, you want to seek out an election judge, especially if you're waiting in line and you see someone there who is either discussing candidates where other voters can hear, or, you know, like earlier, as we said, if they're wearing buttons or a shirt or a hat or something, alert the election judge first to it and they'll take care of it.

And, you know, those situations are diffused fairly easily.

If you have concerns about other aspects of election integrity, you know again, your first point of contact should be an election judge.

The second point of contact would be your county clerk himself or herself.

If you think that there are, you know, is some kind of issue that the election judges are not addressing properly in your polling place, then you would want to contact the county clerk or the board of election, whichever jurisdiction is in charge of your elections.

- And if you have a problem, if you go in to vote and for some reason your name isn't on the roll or they have some question or another, I know a lot of people may sometimes get discouraged if they run into a problem just as soon as they start to go in, should they call their county clerk?

How can they make sure that their ballot can be cast even if there are some hiccups along the way?

- Well, because Illinois has same day registration, the most common problem you'd encounter is a voter shows up at the polling place and you maybe they haven't voted in a long time or whatever, and they find out that no, you're no longer registered to vote.

The solution to that would be to re-register.

And if that were the case, and if you didn't come prepared to register to vote, you don't have your ID with you.

In that case, you'd cast a provisional ballot.

And a provisional ballot is simply a temporary ballot that you mark, and rather than running it through a tabulator to be counted, you give it back to an election judge who then puts it in the secure container with other provisional ballots.

Then you have seven days to go to your county clerk's office or your Board of elections office and produce the required ID to complete your registration.

Then your provisional ballot is removed from the secure container, and then it can be voted, run through the tabulator and voted.

That'd be the most common problem.

Another thing that has gone into effect in Illinois is that every election jurisdiction is required to have one location where any voter can vote regardless of what precinct they live in.

Now, in almost exclusive, downstate, that's almost exclusively in the office of the county clerk or Board of Election.

in Chicago, all 50 ward voting locations are also set up as what we call vote centers.

That's a place where anybody can vote regardless of the precinct you live in within your county or your city.

So if you don't know, you know, you know you're a resident of this county, I don't know where my precinct is, I don't have time to look it up, go to your county clerk's office, they'll treat it as a vote center.

You can vote there.

We have a lot of different contingencies to deal with any of these last minute emergencies that might arise.

But bottom line is if you're, if you're 18 years old and you're a US citizen and you have residence in the county that you live in, you're entitled to vote.

And Illinois has done everything we can to make sure that you get to exercise that right.

- One of the things in terms of the timeline of elections that I think is sometimes forgotten and I know people have questions about is the vote canvasing that's done.

You mentioned that provisional votes, you have a week's time to get your ID and prove that you actually live in the precinct where you voted.

And part of that is because the election is not certified until two weeks after election day.

That allows for mail-in votes, those provisional votes, military offshore voting to be tabulated.

How confusing is that for people and and what does the state board have in terms of, you know, explaining what this is?

Why is that two weeks necessary?

- Sure, and really it's not that complicated.

It's the two weeks is necessary because any vote by mail ballot that is postmarked on or before November 8th can be accepted and voted up to two weeks after election day.

So if you have a vote by mail ballot and you can't decide how to vote it and you wait until election day to do that, you can fill it out, you put it back in its secure envelope, you take it to the post office, you make sure they put that postmark on it that day, as long as it makes it to your election authority within two weeks, your ballot will be counted.

A lot of our election authorities also have secure drop boxes.

Downstate, those are mostly located at the office of the county clerk where you can just go drop your ballot in.

Those are emptied every day and every night.

Those are also locked at 7:00 PM on November 8th.

So nobody else can put ballots in after the polls close.

So the reason for that two week time is because we allow for any ballots that are actually voted and postmarked on election day to find their way, you know, to trickle in depending on how long it takes for the postal service to get them to the Office of the Election authority.

It's another reason why voters on election night need to be aware that those figures that you see online or on TV or on radio stations as they report them, those are unofficial numbers.

Those are not the official totals, and they're gonna change and in some races, they could change somewhat significantly.

And you may see leads go up and down in the days after election day as more vote by mail ballots come in.

And I should point out too, that that's not a new thing.

We did hear a lot about it in 2020 because we had an extremely high volume of people voting by mail in 2020 due to the pandemic.

in Illinois, we had 2 million votes cast by mail, one third of the total vote.

We had never had more than about 9% cast by mail before then.

And, but I always like to point out that if you go back to 2014, there was a race for state treasurer between the current treasurer, Mike Frerichs and his Republican opponent was Tom Cross, who was at the time, I believe he was the Republican leader of the Illinois House.

Well, election night that race was too close to call.

It was, I believe the margin may have been under a thousand votes.

However, as vote by mail ballots came in, in the days after the election, that margin widened significantly.

And Treasurer Frerichs was elected by several thousand votes.

So this is not a new phenomenon.

It's been going on for a while.

And it's, it's not indicative of, we heard a lot of talk post 2020, especially about, you know, suspicious activity because so many votes were recorded after election day.

That's been going on for quite a while and there is nothing suspicious about it.

It's just a matter of when people who vote by mail, when they put their ballots into the mail.

- That was where I was going to go next.

In terms of people worrying about election integrity and those totals that do change over the two weeks after election day, sometimes as you mentioned, significantly, other times, maybe by just a few votes here or there, and it doesn't really affect the outcome.

How does Illinois differ from other states in terms of the way that elections are structured, the people that are in charge of elections, those sorts of things?

- Well, one way that we differ from most other states is that we have elections here being overseen by the Illinois State Board of Elections rather than by an elected secretary of state.

Now, that was created in the 1970 Constitution specifically so that no elected official who might be participating in an election is the top election official making important decisions about how that election is administered.

I think we saw in Georgia in 2018, there were a lot of, you know, it was kind of controversial there because you did have a candidate for governor who was the Secretary of State, who was the top state election official, and there was debate about their voting machines and lack of a paper trail and all that stuff, and is it gonna affect the election?

Don't have that in Illinois.

We don't have that in Illinois specifically because the State Board of Elections administers the election.

We do the canvasing, we approve the voting systems that are used by your local election authorities.

We are governed here by an eight member board, the board members are four appointed Democrats and four appointed Republicans.

The governor makes those appointments, and in the case of the opposite party of the governor, the governor makes those appointments with input from the other party, in this case, the Republican leadership makes recommendations for its board members.

So any decisions regarding election policy have to be passed with votes from at least five of our board members.

So one party cannot unilaterally vote to make anything that amounts to a major policy decision in elections in Illinois.

So that's very significant.

Regarding election integrity, one of the things that we have done for the last several elections is we've tried to publicize all of the ways in which the, the Illinois election system checks and rechecks every piece of equipment that's used in that election.

And specifically, you know, to a voter, you recognize the tabulator that you feed your ballot into.

And there's a really extensive testing process that those have to go through before an election.

There's actually an extensive testing process that they have to go through before they can even be certified by our agency for use in the state.

But then before every election, a pretest is conducted, then a public test is conducted, and those are going on right now.

Those have to be done no later than five days before the election.

So those are going on in various counties now, but the parties are invited to those, law enforcement, the public is, they're open to the public.

You can see your county clerk put each, put the tabulators through their paces to make sure they're reading every ballot that's being used in the county.

And, you know, you can have literally dozens of ballot styles in any county because a voter may have, may live in one legislative district and a specific county board district, a specific congressional district.

And those change from, you know, those lines run throughout counties.

So you have a lot of different ballot styles.

Those have to be, we have to ensure that every tabulator is programmed to correctly read those.

And I've been encouraging members of the public, anybody who has any curiosity about what goes into testing before an election, find out about your public test, contact your county clerk and find out when they're doing it and go watch.

Or if you're really curious, volunteer to be an election judge.

Probably too late to do that now because we're really into the early voting cycle.

But, if you're curious about this, talk to your county clerk, they're more than happy to do anything they can to reassure voters about the integrity of our system.

- With just a couple of minutes remaining, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask some specifics about the upcoming election.

You mentioned earlier that mail-in voting in the 2020 cycle was up dramatically over previous years.

Early voting is already underway.

Are you able to tell at all how this year compares to previous years?

- Well, we know that we are really seeing a surge in vote by mail interest.

In fact, as of today, 730,000 Illinois voters have requested vote by mail ballots from their local election authority.

Now, to put that into perspective, at the last midterm election, we had about 427,000 ballots cast by mail total.

So right now we're at 730,000 requests.

You figure that not all of those, a lot of times people will change their mind.

And if you've requested a vote by mail ballot and you receive it and you decide, I'd rather just go vote on election day, that's fine.

Take your mail ballot with you and surrender it at the polling place.

You'll sign an affidavit and you'll be able to vote in person.

Or if you already have it now and you decide you want to early vote, do the same thing.

If you haven't received your vote by mail ballot yet, let's say it's the day before election day and it hasn't come yet, and you've applied for it and you're worried, go to your early voting location or go to your polling place, tell them I applied.

They'll know you applied because it's gonna show it in the poll book.

Tell them you, I haven't received it.

You'll fill out an affidavit that you haven't received it.

You can vote in person.

Your vote by mail ballot is then voided and you'll be instructed not to vote it because get into lots of trouble for doing that.

That ballot wouldn't count.

But that is something that people, an option that people need to remember, especially given that we do have so many more apparently voting by mail this year.

I won't be surprised if we see 20% of the ballot cast by mail.

We saw about a third of it in the pandemic.

We saw about 15% in a very low turnout primary back in June.

Given the numbers of people who have applied for vote by mail ballots, I'd say we'll probably see in the, I would just, just guessing, I'm gonna say maybe 20%, but a fair number.

Certainly voters, you know, this is kind of interesting that typically from 2018 and before, we would expect to see about two thirds to 70% of the vote statewide cast on election day.

It began to shift once early voting began in the last decade to where we'd see about, you know, maybe 20% would be early voting, and then a little bit of vote by mail, and then both of those have been increasing steadily.

- You can find more information about the guidelines and all the things that you need to know by going to elections.il.gov.

Matt Dietrich, thanks so much for your time, I appreciate it.

- Thank you, Jennifer.

- And you've been watching in focus on WSIU.

Thanks for joining us we'll see you next time.

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