Some DeKalb County Board members question proposed election precinct boundary changes

SYCAMORE – Some DeKalb County Board members are questioning proposed redrawn boundary changes for the county’s election precincts and its effect on partisan voters, with further discussion expected this week.

On Tuesday, DeKalb County officials will look to revise an election precinct boundary realignment plan proposed by DeKalb County Clerk Tasha Sims during last week’s DeKalb County Board Committee of the Whole meeting.

The Ad Hoc County Board working group, consisting of two County Board members from each political party, the County Clerk, Elections Division staff, and the county’s Information Management Office along with the office’s geographic information system staff, will meet at 1 p.m. Tuesday in the DeKalb County Administrative Building.

The changes Sims proposed would remove at least four entire precincts in the city of DeKalb and changed the boundaries of all remaining precincts in the city – the majority of which would have new polling place locations. All of the precincts inside the city of Sycamore would have their boundaries changed under Sims’ proposal.

While the proposal would reduce the number of precincts in DeKalb County’s largest city, the village of Kingston would get two new precincts and the city of Genoa, the city of Cortland, the village of Kirkland, and the Squaw Grove township would each gain one.

This is really partisan and this is really problematic for the people I specifically represent in the downtown DeKalb area, and I cannot support this at all.”

—  Scott Campbell, DeKalb County Board Democrat

“I don’t see how this is a win-win, I would add, not subtract,” said County Board member Ellingsworth Webb, a Democrat from District 9.

Webb, a 16-year election judge veteran, said he believes “less is never best” when it comes to election precincts, and worried that the remaining polling places will have longer lines because of consolidated precincts. He also said he doesn’t like changing the precincts in DeKalb after voters in two precincts in the city were issued new voter registration cards with changes to their polling place weeks before the 2022 General Election.

According to county documents, the objectives of the proposed precinct realignment are to balance voter count where possible by splitting precincts with higher voter counts and combining precincts with fewer registered voters, to reduce the number of precincts split between County Board and city ward districts.

The number of registered voters allowed within a given precinct by Illinois Election Law rose from 800 to 1,200 in November 2021. However, according to county documents, 15 precincts currently have more than 1,200 registered voters. The proposed changes would drop that total by one.

Currently, three of the 15 precincts with more registered voters than allowed by state law are in the city of DeKalb. With the proposed changes, the city would have eight of the estimated 14 precincts that would be over the statutory number.

DeKalb County Board member, and head of the DeKalb County Republican party, Tim Bagby said some of the proposed changes weren’t what he would have guessed. He said he predicted that proposed precinct changes in Squaw Grove, Genoa and Kingston would be “busted up.”

“I was a little bit surprised to see Sycamore and Cortland, but once Tasha explained to me what it was she was up to it began to make sense to me,” Bagby said. “That having precincts where you don’t have to guess which district it is, or which line – am I on the congressional district 11 side of the street or congressional district 14 side of the street? – all of those little discriminations add to voter confusion.”

Reducing the number of precincts with different legislative districts cutting through them was one of the reasons Sims gave for why the DeKalb County Clerk and Recorder office wants revise the precinct map boundaries.

In the April 2023 Consolidated Election – when a little over 6,000 of the more than 62,000 registered voters participated – 208 ballot styles were used, Sims said.

Sims, a Republican who was elected to the office last November but has spent more than a dozen years working for the county in administrative staff roles, said she took efforts to remove herself from the process of redrawing DeKalb County’s precinct boundaries.

While she oversaw the project, Sims said she was not directly involved in the creation of the proposed precinct boundary changes. For that she said her office relied on help from the Dekalb County’s geographic information system mapping experts.

“My intent is not political, it is not to disenfranchise anyone, and I understand that there is a large amount of change before a General Primary Election. But since I came into office I said that I would run fair and nonpartisan elections, and I feel that if I’m able to get these changes in place that is how we start to do that,” Sims said to the County Board’s Committee of the Whole on June 14.

Ahead of that meeting, Sims said she believes the map her office is proposing was fair and hoped the county discourse wouldn’t be political, but feared it could be regardless.

DeKalb County Board member Scott Campbell, a Democrat from District 7, said Sims “did nothing partisan here, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t, at the end, end up being partisan – which it did, but not to Tasha’s intent.”

“And if any of the Democrats would be want to argue with me about that I’m happy to fight with you on this for Tasha. It was not done with some ill intent whatsoever,” Campbell said.

Despite his initial statement, Campbell said he was staunchly against the proposed precinct boundary changes.

“This is really partisan and this is really problematic for the people I specifically represent in the downtown DeKalb area, and I cannot support this at all,” Campbell said. “And I do not recommend that anyone else do because it’s bad for a lot of voters, those voters happen to be predominately from one party, so it’s unintentionally – again – partisan.”

Campbell proposed setting up an Ad Hoc working group that would meet to consider what can be done about the 15 precincts over the 1,200 registered voter allowance, and the Executive Committee unanimously approved the idea.

Before Campbell proposed the working group, Bagby called the proposal a “very good first draft” and said it’s ultimately the County Board’s responsibility to set the precinct boundaries.

No vote on the proposal has yet occurred.