McHenry County clerk releases corrected election results

The McHenry County Clerk’s Office on Friday released new, corrected results for Tuesday’s local consolidated election.

After a technical error with the office’s ballot tabulation devices led to a full recount of votes Thursday, the new results were posted to the county’s election results webpage about 12:50 p.m. Friday.

These results still are unofficial and will not be finalized and certified until two weeks after Tuesday’s election, according to Illinois state statute. Mail-in ballots postmarked by the election, as well as those cast provisionally that have any outstanding issues resolved, still will be counted.

Votes for write-in candidates also were not included in the new results posted Friday afternoon and will be posted to the county clerk’s website when they are fully counted, according to a statement posted on the election results page Friday.

McHenry County Clerk Joe Tirio originally hoped to post new results Thursday night before settling on midmorning Friday. They went live midday Friday.

“We got off to a slow start, and it soon became clear that this was going to take longer than expected,” he said in a statement posted to the clerk’s office’s Facebook page at the end of the day Thursday. “We understand the inconvenience this causes, but more importantly appreciate the need to get this done correctly.”

The candidates leading in five of the county’s competitive school board races – Huntley School District 158, Alden-Hebron School District 19, McHenry School District 15, Cary School District 26 and Crystal Lake Elementary School District 47 – changed with the release of the corrected results.

The outcome of the race for the Trout Valley Village Board also changed with Friday’s correction, the only one of the county’s municipal races to be affected with the update. The vote count in the race was quite low Tuesday night, with two candidates receiving less than 20 votes. On Friday, Michelle Gilbert overcame David Peterson to join David Hall and Robert Antrim in claiming the board’s three open seats.

Tirio said he did not know why this race was affected but added that he would look into the matter further.

“I haven’t had a chance to look at the Trout Valley race,” he said. “I just printed a 402-page report to go through and see where there were changes and that sort of thing. ... We will definitely give it a look, and if there’s anything curious about it, we will investigate further.”

In the case of District 158, newcomers Katherine Policheri and Laura Murray were knocked out of the top four candidates who will take seats on the board once the results are certified. Incumbents Paul Troy and Anthony Quagliano now are on track to take their place, joining fellow incumbents Sean Cratty and Lesli Melendy.

As of Friday, Cratty had garnered 14.5% of the vote followed by Melendy with 13.4%, Troy with 13.4%, Quagliano with 12.8%, Susan Hochmuth with 10.4%, Murray with 9.9%, Policheri with 9.9%, Dana Dalton-Wiley with 8.9% and Tara Masino with 6.74%.

In District 19, Penny Smith and Johnny Eskridge now are set to join Andy Madsen and Brandon Berg on the board, with Eskridge seeing the biggest change to his total votes from only 35 reported Tuesday to 257 Friday. Matt Misiek and Ricky Madsen Jr. were knocked out of the top four.

Smith now is leading the group with 20.1% of the vote, followed by Madsen with 18.9%, Berg with 17.4%, Eskridge with 16.2% and Madsen with 13.8%, according to Friday’s results. Misiek fell from second place to last with 13.7%.

In District 15, Friday’s results pushed Patrick DeGeorge from second place to last with 17.4% of the vote, meaning he no longer is on track to join the board. The four candidates are include Lindsay Morley (21.4%), Jennifer Synek (21.3%), Rachel McDonnell (20.9%) and Chad Mihevc (19.1%).

Friday’s update also affected District 26, in which Anne Santucci now leads with 1,089 votes, or 22.6% of the total vote. Stacey Sault is in second with 21.1% of the vote, followed by Melinda Hartman with 20.5%, Julie Jette with 19.0% and Anthony Stefani with 16.7%.

In the initial results posted Tuesday night, Hartman, Santucci, Stefani and Sault were on track to claim the four open seats in District 26. Now, Jette has taken Stefani’s place.

In District 47, newcomers Tim Mahaffy and Debra Barton are leading the race with 17.2% and 16.9% of the vote, respectively. Incumbents Jonathan Powell (15.9%) and Betsy Les (15.2%) are on track to keep their seats.

Tuesday’s results originally had Mahaffy in first place in the four-seat race with incumbent Emily Smith in second, Barton in third and Powell in fourth, followed by newcomers Daniel Palombit and Cascia Talbert.

As of Friday, Smith garnered 14.5% of the vote, Palombit had 12.6% and Talbert had 7.7%.

The vote shares of candidates in other school board races changed as well, but these five were the only contested races in which Friday’s update changed the outcome.

Votes cast for some of the county’s school board races were underreported Tuesday night because of changes made to the descriptions of the terms for these races, which altered the spacing of the ballot just enough to interfere with the machinery’s ability to read votes correctly, Tirio said Thursday.

The clerk’s office uses tabulation machines to count votes, and these machines are programmed to read votes off a ballot by looking for the darkened circles where each vote is marked based on the design of the ballot, also known as “target areas,” Tirio said.

Before Tuesday’s election, a change was made to the language used to describe terms for some local school board races, Tirio said. This changed the format of some ballots just enough to throw off the location of those darkened circles so that they no longer matched up with the “target areas” preprogrammed into the tabulation machines.

Tirio said Thursday that he was unsure of whether this error could also affect other down-ballot races.

“I think it’s less likely that things that were near the top of the ballot will be affected, but things at or below the school level, some may be affected,” he said. “So there’s a chance that those races could have different outcomes.”

The results of votes cast in other down-ballot races for local entities such as park district boards or library boards also appeared to be affected in Friday’s update but were not affected enough to change the outcome.

The problem first was reported in a statement issued by Tirio late Wednesday morning, which stated only that his office had discovered “anomalies” in the results that caused some races to be “misreported.”

It wasn’t until the next day that the clerk’s office could definitively say why this occurred.

The underreported races first were brought to Tirio’s attention by members of the Democratic Party of McHenry County, who noticed that two candidates in the District 26 race had received no votes at all in some precincts, party Chairwoman Kristina Zahorik said Wednesday.

“I don’t feel that they’re paying attention,” she said Thursday of the ordeal. “This is a pattern and practice with this clerk and the office, and it goes beyond a partisan issue; it’s just that we are the ones that are checking.”

McHenry County Republican Party Chairman Tyler Wilke said Thursday that this was an unfair criticism of the clerk.

“There are many moving parts, and in the past year we have seen changes in the election law that create more burdens and responsibilities of the clerk,” Wilke said in a written statement. “To attack the clerk rather than trying to get to the bottom of this to ensure free and fair elections seems to me to be a mix-up of priorities.”

Given that the problem turned out to be a technological error borne of an unnoticed formatting issue, McHenry County Board Chairman Mike Buehler said he does not see a need for the County Board to get involved.

“The processes in place worked as intended to identify and correct the issue,” Buehler said. “I wouldn’t see the need at this time for any kind of hearing.”

Zahorik said Friday that she has heard from some people who want to call upon the Illinois State Board of Elections to come to McHenry County and look over the operations of the clerk’s office.

Under ISBE procedures, the agency would not come to McHenry County unless requested to do so, spokesman Matt Dietrich said.

“We don’t have any problem with anybody coming and having a look as long as it doesn’t interfere with us getting our work done,” Tirio said Friday.