HB 1968, which I previously commented upon (August 30), contains a number of important provisions. One was the subject of much debate last year and deserves some discussion.
In 2003, the Illinois General Assembly passed legislation implementing the provisional voting requirements of the Help America to Vote Act. The Illinois legislation included the following provision.

(b) If a county clerk or board of election commissioners determines that all of
the following apply, then a provisional ballot is valid and shall be counted as
a vote:
(1) The provisional voter cast the provisional ballot in the correct precinct based on the address provided by the provisional voter.

To most election officials, this language was clear. However, in 2004 a spate of law suits challenged language similar to this in Ohio, Michigan, and Missouri. The State Board of Elections, in a dubious legal move, preemptively advised Illinois election officials to administer the statute contrary to the clear language and instead to adopt the reasoning of the litigants in the various states. This would have required provisional ballots to have been counted in whatever jurisdictions the voter would have been entitled to vote in, regardless of whether the voter cast the ballot in the correct precinct. For the majority of election officials, this interpretation of the statute was not only incorrect, it was an invitation to anarchy. Under this reading, a voter in Rantoul, working at the University of Illinois, could go to a polling place on campus and be allowed to cast a vote for President, U.S. Senate, Congress, and every county wide office. It would make it nearly impossible to determine how many ballots would be cast in a precinct because the number of eligible voters for the precinct was essentially the population of the county.

Most election officials, including me, rejected the interpretation of the State Board of Elections and continued with the policy which we had already implemented and operated under in the March 2004 Primary and for which we had already trained our election judges for the November 2004 election. Some, like Cook County, implemented a modified system that counted votes cast in the wrong precinct for federal offices only. Prior to the election, the appellate court over the states of Ohio and Michigan ruled against the plaintiffs and declared that it was within the guidelines of HAVA to not count provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct.

However, because the SBE issued their advisory opinion, many people felt that additional clarification was needed regarding provisional ballots, despite the clear language of the statute. HB 1968, which was signed this summer, added language that clarifies that the only ballots which should be counted are those cast in the correct precinct. It also added language which mandates that voters be instructed on the correct precinct for them to go to.

This legislation is exactly what we have been doing in Champaign County. When a voter does not appear on the list of registered voters in that precinct, the judges are instructed to contact our office to determine where the person should go to vote. If a person insists on casting the vote in the incorrect precinct, their provisional ballot is not counted.

It was certainly gratifying to see the legislature craft a policy that matched the one already instituted in Champaign County.

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