After a Friend of McHenry County Blog discovered that tens of thousands of votes cast on Election Day did not make it to McHenry County Clerk Mary McClellan’s web site or election results, I emailed Rich Miller of Capitol Fax the data and he called McClellan.
You can read his Thursday article here.
The comments, which come from people all over Illinois will be shared over the next three days. Here the final nine comments:
Easiest way to describe it is like this:
Her votes showed about 116 thousand total
We looked at the Governor’s race and others, and it only showed about 92,000 voted.
When Mary was asked about this on Thursday morning she said it was due to undervotes.
Then after the heat really turned up, she admitted there was an error (even though according to the NW Herald she realized there was an error on Wednesday night, when Jack Franks called her).
Mary realized early votes hadn’t been counted and entered them in on Thursday afternoon.
The 24,000 difference (116,000 – 92,000) then appeared to be resolved.
Only problem: There were 33,000 early votes.
Bottom line: To simply say the numbers were off because of early votes not being counted can not be entirely correct. It must have been the case that some early votes were counted, but that is not what she said. It raises the question of why some early votes were counted and others weren’t, why she gave knowingly false statements to the newspaper, and why the voting tabulators were counting early votes in their totals but not recording which candidates were selected.
THIS is the story that nearly everybody who covered the original story — Chicago Tribune, Daily Herald, Capitol Fax, etc. — missed. Once again, local conservative talk radio hosts Dan Proft and Joe Walsh yammered on about Broward County, Florida but couldn’t be bothered to discuss neighboring McHenry County. The state and local GOP was relatively silent, with the exception of a one sentence press release by Allen Skillicorn that was published virtually nowhere and a threat by McSweeney to contact the State Board of Elections (a quick search on the SBE’s website reveals no complaint was filed by McSweeney — though feel free to post it if you can locate it). The State Board of Elections did not look into it — they just took Jack and Mary’s word for it. McSweeeney more or less said he was happy with the outcome. Nearly everybody, with the exception of a few commenters on this blog, completely dropped the ball.
Now the results are final. An investigation is even less likely. That means whatever problems there are with the voting machines may go unresolved. I hope everybody reading this trusts Joe Tirio to look into that. Remember, the initial numbers had Michael Rein (R) winning and they had Underwood (D) and Zettler (D) losing the county.
Soccermom- As a resident of McHenry County I believe it is a staunchly Republican county and I think many people underestimated how well Underwood and others would do.
That being said I saw a lot of Underwood yard signs around McHenry County so the tide may be slowly changing.
Lastly, IMO Jack Franks may in theory be a Democrat but most of his actions/views are Republican/Conservative. Not surprising given as I mention above that McHenry county is strongly Republican. Hence Franks is pandering to his base but being two-faced (Democrat in name only) about it.
By the added votes the Democrats have apparently picked up another seat on the county board which in IMO will erode some of Franks power.
So any “vote suppression” was a failed attempt at affecting statehouse races AND keeping Democrats from seats on the County board thus maintaining Franks control.
And she wanted to be a judge, a contest in which she was defeated.
https://www.mchenrycountyil.gov/county-government/departments-a-i/county-clerk
That article about 24,000 EV being cast was posted in October.
We always forget what our other choices were.