Election clerk wants just a little more time

Applying for an absentee ballot for this primary started on Christmas Eve.

And the week after Christmas, candidate Bob McQuillan trucked to downtown Chicago, not to see the windows at Macy's, but a judge in Cook County circuit court, as the Geneva resident tried to save his state House candidacy from a petition challenge.

If Kane County Chief Deputy Clerk Jay Bennett and his boss had their way, there would be a bit more breathing room in the election calendar.

"It's time to make some smart revisions," Bennett said Monday. "We've got to think about the time crunches."

He brought the matter up Jan. 8 at the annual Kane County legislative committee breakfast with state legislators.

Several factors are making the job of getting an election ready harder, he said.

One, he said, is that there are more challenges to petitions. Depending on the office sought, those challenges are heard and investigated by local election authorities or the state board of elections (as was McQuillan's case). Decisions can be appealed in the court system.

"The state board went on forever," Bennett said, due to its workload.

This results in delays certifying ballots. In Illinois, the state board didn't certify its candidates until Thursday, Dec. 17, even though the election calendar called for that to be done and turned over to local election authorities by Dec. 3.

Problem was, the local authorities were supposed to have ballots finished by Monday, Dec. 21, available to be sent to U.S. military personnel and their dependents, and citizens residing overseas. That's become more important, due to the increased number of National Guardsmen on overseas duty, Bennett said.

The second is that those absentee ballots for those people have to be available up to 15 days sooner than they used to, by federal law.

Moving the primary back to February, as legislators did in 2008, didn't help matters, Bennett said, as holidays ate into the schedule.

He noted some candidates were reluctant to campaign much during the holiday season, feeling voters would find it distasteful. "People are saying it (the campaign season) starts today, because it did not start until after the BCS bowl," he told the legislators Jan. 8.

On Monday, however, Bennett came up with one positive: "We had a lot of (college) students voting in person over Christmas break," he said.

Moving filing up a few more days - maybe five - on the front end of the schedule would help, Bennett said. "We're not talking months or weeks," he said.