Illinois county clerk destroys ballots early

By THOMAS HARGROVE
Scripps Howard News Service
October 01, 2004

CAIRO, Ill. - The clerk in Alexander County said she destroyed all of the ballots from the 2002 election shortly before she received a Freedom of Information Act request to allow examination of several hundred questionable votes.

Gloria Patton said she could not honor the Freedom of Information Act request filed Sept. 7 by Scripps Howard News Service to produce 3,451 punch-card ballots cast in the Nov. 5, 2002, gubernatorial election. The wire service is investigating ballots cast in Alexander County that did not register votes for the offices of governor, U.S. senator and Illinois attorney general.

"We removed everything," Patton said Thursday.

Patton said the ballots were discarded from her storage room in the Alexander County Courthouse in late August to "clean up back here because they were going to do air conditioning in here." She said ballots from elections held in 1999, 2001 and 2002 were discarded at that time.

Federal law requires every "officer of election" in the United States to retain voting records for at least 22 months. By Illinois statute, county clerks are designated as the election official obligated to preserve ballots.

An attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, which three years ago filed a civil suit against the voting practices in Alexander County and three other state election districts, said he is concerned by Patton's admission.

"If government officials violated the rules regulating elections - such as the rule requiring retention of ballots - then that would be very disturbing," said Adam Schwartz of the ACLU's Chicago office.

Rebecca Daugherty of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press said, "Nobody can do anything when the records are destroyed. You can sue the officials for sanctions, but it won't help you get the records. Destroyed is destroyed."

The committee - which assists reporters nationwide in gaining access to local, state and federal government information - rarely finds proof that documents were destroyed because a reporter made a Freedom of Information Act request for them.

"That would be a fairly egregious violation of the Freedom of Information laws," she said.

Patton said she thought she was legally required to keep ballots for a year and a half. "I was told 18 months unless there was litigation. We didn't have any litigation," she said.

Patton replaced former Alexander County Clerk Louis Maze, who pleaded guilty in 2001 to one count of mutilation of election materials from the March 21, 2000, primary election. He originally was indicted on charges of forgery of absentee ballots. Maze was sentenced to one year probation and 100 hours of community service.

The ACLU lawsuit three years ago challenged the use of punch-card voting in Alexander County, East St. Louis, Chicago and the city's suburban voting districts in Cook County, charging that they unfairly disenfranchised black voters. Election experts say punch card ballots are more likely to produce tabulation errors than newer methods like touch-screen electronic voting or optically scanned ballots.

"We picked these counties because of a high fall-off rate (in tabulating votes) and a high percentage of African Americans," Schwartz said. "We are closely monitoring what is happening in Illinois and especially in these four districts with this archaic, rotten punch-card voting system."

The so-called "fall-off" rate in Alexander County routinely is the largest in Illinois. In the case of the ballots sought by Scripps Howard from the 2002 general election, only 92 percent of the ballots cast registered a vote for governor. Just 84 percent recorded a vote for U.S. Senate.

The ACLU lawsuit ended in a settlement in which all four voting districts promised to switch to newer methods of voting no later than by February 2006.

"We will have a new (voting) system here next year because of all of the over-votes and under-votes," Patton said. "You have to educate people about voting and how to vote."