County corrects precinct mix-ups

New voter identification cards issued after outrage shown by students, residents
By Dan Strumpf
September 24, 2004

The Daily Northwestern

Errors in Evanston voter rolls involving dozens of residents and students filed under incorrect wards and precincts have been fixed as of Thursday morning, Evanston and Cook County officials said.

The Cook County Clerk's Office has corrected at least 33 errors in which voters' precincts were misidentified after the Evanston city clerk's office began pointing them out earlier this week, said Scott Burnham, spokesman for the Suburban Cook County Board of Elections.

The final corrections to voter rolls were made Thursday, he said. At least 16 new voter identification cards are being issued to Evanston voters including some NU students who recently received cards with misidentified wards and precincts.

Associated Student Government President Jane Lee, who recently received a voter identification card that misidentified her ward and precinct, said she was contacted by Clem Balanoff, director for Cook County elections department, Thursday who explained the errors and assured her that students would not lose their votes come Election Day this November.

Burnham was confident that all affected students would be able to vote.

"We've always had a good relationship with Northwestern officials and we hope to keep that," Burnham said.

ASG Senate passed a bill Wednesday urging Cook County to correct the errors.

"We noticed a problem, we acted on it and now we got it resolved," Lee said.

NU students comprised the largest group of voters whose new precincts were misidentified on the rolls, said Jessica Feldman, an Evanston resident and elections volunteer approached by the Evanston City Clerk's Office to scrutinize rolls several weeks ago. This batch of errors was corrected Thursday, she said.

"If you've got a block of just single family houses," it doesn't take as long to correct because only a handful of residents live at any given address, Feldman said. "If you've got a block of students, then you've got more."

The vast majority of mistakes Feldman found were near redrawn ward boundaries the most obvious place to look for voters whose precincts have been misidentified, she said.

But a small cadre of voters who lived nowhere near redrawn boundaries were also found to have their precincts listed incorrectly. More of these "random errors" could still be sprinkled around Evanston and they are almost impossible to identify, Feldman said.

"The random stuff is still up in the air," she said.

The Cook County Clerk's Office distributed the voter rolls in June to reflect last year's redistricting. Evanston officials then approved the rolls, Burnham said, but later approached the county after the errors were found.

Errors in which voters accidentally are placed in the wrong precincts on voter rolls are not uncommon after ward redistricting, officials said.

In the city of Berwyn, Ill., which redistricted its wards in 2002, some voters received as many as three voter identification cards with different precinct listings before the March primaries, said Louise Sommese, elections clerk coordinator for Berwyn. A spokeswoman in the City of Des Plaines, Ill., clerk's office said similar precinct mistakes took place after that city's 2002 redistricting.