Former McHenry County Board member Ersel Schuster shares this account of the Huntley Area Tea Party meeting on Thursday night:

A Brief Summary of the Election Integrity Townhall Meeting

Those attending the 1/13/22 townhall meeting in Huntley, hosted by the Huntley Area Tea Party (HATP), heard an in-depth review of our ground-level, election system, and of election integrity.

Guest speakers for the evening were Joe Tirio, McHenry County Clerk, and John P. Duggan, Attorney representing Kane County Clerk Cunningham.

Prompted by the audience, both speakers responded to the nationwide issues surrounding the 2020 election.

Both speakers described local election as, “mostly clean.”

To that point, there were attendees who voiced concern over an issue of ballot availability in certain areas of the county.

When called to their attention, McHenry County reviewed the concerns and found that an older method of defining boundary lines was causing the problem.

Once identified, the correction of dropping the “grouped boundaries” method and using each voter address to locate ballots.

Addressed and corrected

Loudly, and clearly, citizens want accountability for those identified as having tampered with an election.

The concern is, people are not being held accountable for their criminal acts, nor are they paying for those crimes.

Agreeing with the audience, both speakers strongly emphasized the need for registered voters to become involved by joining as volunteers, as election judges, and poll watchers.

Only when we have an involved electorate, willing to speak up when they witness an election violation occurring; only when we have citizens with the courage to testify to such a case; only then, can the system work.

Good people need to step up and identify wrongdoing when they witness such acts.

Each speaker addressed the methods utilized by their respective counties to ensure these local elections are clear and clean.

Explained in detail were the new, technical procedures used to count, record, and document the votes.

While deep and extensive, the new procedures assure greater accuracy of vote counts. Full details are for another article.

A critical takeaway from this townhall meeting was the matter of the ‘new voter laws’ being proposed by Congress.

The objective of such legislation is in seeking control of elections, uniformly, and in all jurisdictions in America.

One could say the issue is “local v federal” control of our entire voting system.

Looking at this from a local perspective, and by example; in Illinois, as with most states, control rests at the local county level.

Effectively, each authority in the state employs safeguards protecting their local election equipment and systems.

Each has its own keys, passwords, etc., etc., to access these systems.

Each has a defined process for managing the elections.

This means, anyone bent on skullduggery would need an army of like-minded folks to cover every system in the state to have a statewide impact on an election.

While maintaining local control of elections, anyone attempting a criminal act of an election, would/could, more quickly identified with the significantly narrower search base, thus, quickly locating the culprit(s) so justice is served.

On the contrary, with the federal government controlling all the voting equipment, and systems/processes for the entire country; one person, with malicious intent, could theoretically, gain access to one piece of information and corrupt an entire election.

True trust in our election systems is dependent on “local” control of those systems.

Local control means vigilance on the part of every citizen and voter… step up, volunteer, becoming an election judge, or a poll watcher!

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Commenter “Lani Murphy” adds the following:

Joe’s talk included not even having the voting machines connect to the secure intranet for end of night voting tabulation. All tabulations on the drives will be delivered to the county.

McHenry County has paper ballots.

By statute voter rolls are cleared thru a process. The name has to go thru several voting cycles of not voting before the persons name can be removed.

Joe developed a thing with the coroner to get names right away of county citizens who died so at least those will be removed immediately.

He’s working on a bill with state senators that would let the individual voter decide whether they want to protect their voter identity by requiring polling places to ask for ID in order to vote.

They already do an audit of hand counting a race to see if it matches with machine counts to make sure they match.

Tirio is also requiring the election for Clerk be included in an audit whenever the clerk is in the election.

Oh and I learned that we have provisional ballots where Kane County does not. Not sure how Kane can disenfranchise voters that way.

Oh and Pritzker cut down the time for candidates to turn in their petitions from 90 days to 60. WTH!

A few other things seemed interesting to others that I didn’t get. Over my pay grade. Precincts had to be redrawn after census? The board was voting on it the following night. Not sure why this is necessary? Or if the board can vote to keep them the same if they wanted to?

And more in-depth Election Judge training including special handwriting analysis for signature comparison.

And there are election judges just for signatures on mail-in-ballots.

And security on the county’s one and only outdoor drop box.

I also didn’t know we had 40 days to vote! That seems utterly ridiculous to me that Americans can’t commit to vote within 3 days to a week tops! Crazy.

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Thanks to Friends of McHenry County Blog for the photos.