Could trickle of absentee, provisional ballots lift Kirk Dillard over Bill Brady?
Chicago Sun-Times
BROWN: Six days after the polls closed, 213 more ballots for Illinois' primary election turned up Monday in Cook County. But don't get your blood pressure up. These ballots didn't just materialize in some musty warehouse as in elections past. This was all perfectly normal, expected and legal. These were all absentee ballots that arrived in Monday's mail. They still count because they were postmarked by Feb. 1, the day before the election. By comparison, DuPage County took in five more absentee ballots on Monday with just two more in Lake County. Such straggler absentee votes are one of the main reasons it's still too soon to call the outcome of the Republican race for governor, now reduced to a two-way battle between Sen. Bill Brady of Bloomington and Sen. Kirk Dillard of Hinsdale. In a normal election, nobody would care about these last few votes, but this year every vote will truly count. Brady is clinging to an unofficial 400-some vote lead over Dillard, an amazingly close contest that had been pushed to the back burner while everyone was understandably distracted by Scott Lee Cohen and the debacle over the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor. Now that the Cohen saga has quieted down with his decision to withdraw, attention will return to the far more important business of deciding which Republican will face Gov. Quinn in November, even while Quinn and the Democrats go about the job of picking Cohen's replacement. Of immediate interest is the tallying of late-arriving mail absentee and provisional votes. A provisional ballot is one cast by a voter whose registration has been challenged by election judges at the precinct level. Those ballots are kept separate and counted later if it is determined the voter was properly registered. In most of Illinois' 102 counties, election officials save these mail absentee and provisional votes, then cast them all at once on Feb. 16, the legal cutoff date. Lake County is now sitting on 302 Republican ballots waiting to be cast -- 232 absentees and 70 provisionals -- according to Lake County Chief Deputy Clerk Cindy Pagano. DuPage County has 126 absentee ballots yet to be counted, three-fourths of which are expected to be Republican, along with 256 Republican provisional ballots, less than a third of which are expected to go into the final count. In Cook County, officials try to update their vote totals as the ballots are processed, which makes the statewide vote totals something of a moving target. For instance, Cook County Clerk David Orr posted his latest results Friday night, adding 62 votes for Dillard and 20 for Brady, shaving a net of 42 off Brady's lead. Of the aforementioned 213 ballots that arrived in Monday's mail, the clerk's office -- which administers elections in suburban Cook -- accounted for 118 of those, while the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners received the other 95. In addition, the county has almost finished processing its 838 provisional ballots, 231 of which are Republican. But only about one-fourth of those are expected to be allowed. Orr's office plans to update its totals again sometime today, while the Chicago election board said it will update either today or Wednesday. There's no reason to expect Cook County to produce a big shift in the GOP race. Only 28 of those uncounted suburban absentee ballots are Republican. While no party breakdown was available for the city absentees or provisionals, fewer than 10 percent of city primary voters took Republican ballots. I realize I've just thrown a lot of numbers at you. Bottom line: Dillard may close the gap, but it would be a surprise if he erased Brady's lead. On election night, I got all jazzed up thinking we were in store for a rare double recount -- with the gubernatorial nominations of both major political parties going down to the wire. But as close as the race between Quinn and Dan Hynes was -- less than one vote per precinct -- in the end it wasn't that close, unofficially winding up somewhere in the neighborhood of 8,000 votes. While a recount is still a possibility in the Republican race, that would also seem unlikely if the Brady lead holds in the 400 range. What was less apparent to me on election night than it is in the cold light of day is that even 400 votes is a significant margin in this era of technologically advanced voting equipment. When I started covering elections, a victory margin of 5,000 votes in a statewide race was cause to seek a recount. Now, nobody is quite certain where the cutoff line is. Is it 500? Is it 200? Dillard could have a very tough decision facing him after Feb. 16.
>> Read more at Illinois News Page
Cohen says he's dropping out of race
Chicago Tribune
SCHORSCH & PEARSON: The state central committee is not bound to select any of the candidates who lost to Cohen in last week’s primary. State Rep. Art Turner of Chicago, a member of Madigan’s House leadership team who was backed by the powerful Southwest Side lawmaker, finished second to Cohen. Even before Cohen stepped off the ticket, some Democratic leaders said privately that they would like to expand a search beyond the primary election contenders and look to fill the vacancy to provide some regional balance--namely a downstate resident. Currently, all of the nominees on the Democratic statewide ticket come from Chicago - a point Republicans have used in the past to contend that city-controlled politics dominates state policy. Republicans faced a similar problem on their statewide ticket in 2004, when the primary-elected nominee for U.S. Senate, businessman Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race amid damaging disclosures contained in his divorce file. The Illinois GOP held an open casting call for the post but ended up settling on controversial conservative Republican activist Alan Keyes from Maryland to run as the nominee. Keyes was swamped by then-state Sen. Barack Obama in the 2004 general election. Turner, said he would make a case to the state central committee that he was the most qualified of those who sought the lieutenant governor nomination - but that his second-place finish should not automatically give him the spot. “I don’t think it ought to be an automatic. The fact that you finished second, I would not want to set a precedent for that,” Turner said. “What I’m saying is that of the people interested in the job-- others could have expressed an interest but didn’t--I am the most qualified.” Ryan dropped from the ticket in late June and the GOP didn’t pick Keyes as a replacement until early August. Democrats, however, could actually benefit from the early February primary by quickly forging a new teammate for Quinn to try to put Cohen's nomination behind them before general election voters tune into the fall contests. Still, Republicans are expected to use the Cohen debacle, on top of the scandal that put Quinn in office - the ouster of disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich - to campaign against the Democrats’ one-party rule of state government. "It will be among the things we'll bring up," said Pat Brady, the state's Republican chairman. "We'll point out what the Democrats have done to get this state where it is. But it's more important to have our candidates talk about what we're going to do."
>> Read more at Illinois News Page
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