McHenry County clerk releases new, corrected election results
The McHenry County clerk's office has released corrected results for Tuesday's local consolidated election.
After a technical error with the office's ballot tabulation devices led to a full recount of votes Thursday, the new results were posted to the county's election results webpage just before 12:50 p.m. Friday.
These results are still unofficial and will not be certified until two weeks after Tuesday's election, according to state law. Late-arriving mail-in ballots and provisionally cast ballots could still be counted.
Votes for write-in candidates also were not included in the new results posted Friday afternoon and will be posted to the county clerk's website when they are fully counted, according to a statement posted on the election results page Friday.
The candidates leading in five of the county's competitive school board races - Huntley School District 158, Alden-Hebron District 19, McHenry District 15, Cary District 26 and Crystal Lake District 47 - changed after the release of the corrected results.
The votes cast for some of the county's school board races were underreported Tuesday night because of changes made to the descriptions of the terms for these races, which altered the spacing of the ballot just enough to interfere with their machinery's ability to read votes correctly, Clerk Joe Tirio said Thursday.
Ultimately, the tallies of votes cast in other down-ballot races for local entities like park district boards or library boards were also affected, but not enough to change the outcome.
The problem was first reported in a statement issued by Tirio late Wednesday morning, which stated only that officials had discovered "anomalies" that caused some races to be "misreported."
It wasn't until the next day that officials could definitively say why this occurred.
The underreported races were first brought to Tirio's attention by members of the Democratic Party of McHenry County, who noticed two candidates in the District 26 board race had received no votes in some precincts.
Given that the problem turned out to be a technological error borne of an unnoticed formatting issue, McHenry County Board Chairman Mike Buehler said he does not see a need for the county board to get involved.
• The Daily Herald contributed to this report.