ILLINOIS (IRN) — Illinois didn’t fare well in a review of state laws pertaining to election integrity performed by the Heritage Foundation.
Zack Smith, a legal fellow with the Heritage Foundation, reviewed election law in all 50 states on a variety of issues.
“And we ranked them based on how well we thought they were doing to make sure their elections are safe and secure and state officials are making it easy to vote and hard to cheat,” Smith told The Center Square. “Now, unfortunately, Illinois didn’t do particularly well on this metric.”
Illinois landed at No. 40 overall with bad marks for no voter ID laws, lax regulations on ballot harvesting and trafficking, and same-day and automatic voter registration.
“Which when you combine that with Illinois’ lax voter maintenance role procedures can make it much, much easier for ineligible voters to slip through the cracks and be able to cast a ballot,” Smith said.
Illinois scored 24 points out of 30 for accuracy of voter registration lists, but scored no points in election litigation procedures, restriction of private funding of election officials or government agencies, as well as restriction of same-day registration, automatic registration and verification of citizenship.
“Illinois doesn’t have very robust restrictions against vote harvesting and vote trafficking,” Smith said. “They don’t have very good procedures in place to make sure that everyone who votes is in fact a citizen.”
Overall, Illinois scored 49 out of 100 points.
In Madison County, NBC 5 St. Louis reports there’s a criminal investigation underway there where an election judge noticed 39 mail-in ballots for the June primary election had similar handwriting.
Smith didn’t have specifics on the case, but said the trope that there’s no election fraud is false.
“Absentee ballots, they are one of the areas that are most rife with fraud,” Smith said.
Heritage Foundation maintains a database that tracks fraud cases across the country. It’s not exhaustive, Smith said, but there are examples of voter fraud reports with dozens of cases spanning back decades.
Illinois voters can vote early starting Sept. 29. That’s also when local election officials will send voters who requested a mail-in ballot their packets. Illinois expanded mail-in voting to include the option of permanent mail-in voting by request.
The general midterm election is Nov. 8.