Editorial: Illinois officials must continue to look into voter registration glitch

Noncitizens casting ballots as the result of a computer glitch made headlines last week in Illinois, a state with a wildly checkered election history in part thanks to the old Chicago machine's colorful and questionable recruitment tactics.

Now, a "programming error" by Secretary of State Jesse White's office is being blamed for more than 500 possible non-U. S. citizens being registered to vote - and a handful of them casting election ballots.

The actual number has not yet been determined. The state does not know exactly how many were noncitizens or how many people were citizens who simply checked a wrong box. State officials are working with local election boards to sort through the confusion, which involves noncitizens in the country legally.

Among the larger number, it initially looked as if 15 noncitizens voted in 2018 and 2019. But eight of the 15 have voting histories and at least three have turned out to be citizens after all.

When the final numbers are determined, they are likely to be small. But the implications are far larger. Five of those voters were in suburban Cook County and one was in DuPage, according to State Board of Elections spokesman Matt Dietrich. And elections here have been decided by a handful of votes at times. Moreover, there's nothing to say that what permitted a small error this time couldn't be an opening for a larger problem later.

The glitch was part of Illinois' new automatic voter registration system, which wrongly forwarded information from people who self-identified as noncitizens to election officials.

White's office has said the error has been addressed. That's great, but it should not be the last Illinois residents hear of the matter.

Officials from the Illinois Secretary of State's office attended a special board of elections meeting Wednesday to explain. And five Republicans on the state's House Executive Committee sent a letter to Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan calling for a hearing and decrying the registrations as "an absurd lack of compliance with state law."

That hearing, initially planned for this week, was canceled, but needs to be rescheduled as soon as possible. Lawmakers must find answers as to how the mistake happened and look into how to prevent future problems.

Too much time has been lost already. The computer error dates back to July 2018. Officials at the Secretary of State's office have said they discovered the issue last month, but the delay in the news becoming public is disappointing.

Early voting for the state's March 17 primary starts next week. We in Illinois need answers about what went wrong with the registration process and assurances that a similar mistake won't be repeated.

And we need them now.