Chaos struck the primary polling places in Illinois during Tuesday’s primary — with reports of workers not showing up, missing equipment and low voter turnout amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Officials in Chicago were forced to replace at least 50 sites at nursing homes that had refused to host voters amidst the outbreak.
“There’s never been an election before where we had to move around 200 precincts,” Chicago Board of Elections spokesman Jim Allen told The Chicago Tribune.
“And I hope to God there never is again.”
The polling place changes and late openings prompted the Cook County Clerk’s Office to keep 40 sites open late for an extra hour.
In Chicago’s North Side, voters for one precinct at a polling place, were allowed to cast ballots while others were being turned away because their equipment wasn’t delivered Tuesday morning.
They were instead sent to another site about a 15-minute walk away, where lines stretched down the street.
In suburban Burbank, southwest of Chicago, only 17 people cast ballots during the first two hours of voting, official said.
Turnout around midday was down more than 50 percent from the 2016 primary, according to Allen.
While the polls were empty, Chicago’s mailboxes were apparently pretty full.
The Windy City broke a World War II-era record for vote-by-mail applications, with 118,000 voters requesting ballots to vote from home, the Tribune reported.
Allen said Tuesday morning that he’d asked Gov. J.B. Pritzker last week to cancel in-person voting and expand other options, including mail-in ballots.
Chicago had warned that they expected to be short on election judges to staff polling places amid the pandemic.
“We were urging the postponement of the election, the abandonment of the polling place model of voting and a conversion to vote by mail for the safety of the voting public,” Allen said.
But the Democratic governor, in a daily press briefing on the state’s outbreak, bashed the request.
“I will not use this moment to supersede my constitutional authority,” Pritzker said. “There are people out there who want to say, ‘Its a crisis, bend the rules and overstep your authority.’ Let me tell you this: It is exactly in times like these when the constitutional boundaries of our democracy should be respected above all else.”
“And if people want to criticize me for that, well go ahead, I’ll wear it like a badge of honor.”
With Post wires