(NewsWorthy.news) – A Chicago Board of Elections official has stated that he mistakenly failed to count more than 9,000 ballots in the primary election’s attorney race in the state. The official confessed he omitted the ballots on the evening of March 18 when counting postal votes in the Illinois state primary election.
The realization prompted fresh scrutiny surrounding postal votes leading up to November’s presidential election. The CBOE spokesman Max Bever expressed deep regret over his error and confessed that he sacrificed accuracy for speed in reporting numbers as quickly as he could. He vowed to share updated figures only when they are accurate and verified.
In the 2020 election former President Donald Trump criticized the postal voting system, arguing that it raises the risk of electoral fraud. Ellen Weintraub, head of the Federal Election Commission, replied to Trump’s claims saying that there was no basis to the “conspiracy theory” linking voting by mail to electoral fraud.
Bever’s failure to count the ballots has seen the Democratic tough-on-crime candidate fall behind her progressive rival. Former Judge Eileen O’Neill Burke was leading Clayton Harris III by 10,000 votes but is reportedly only leading by 2,000 because of the failure to count all votes. O’Neill Burke has promised to bring back the $300 threshold for treating shoplifting as a crime under state law after the departing left-wing State’s Attorney Kim Foxx increased the threshold to $1000. O’Neill Burke argued that the policy promotes crime rather than deterring it. Harris, a former prosecutor and a professor, has suggested punishments should take racial disparities into consideration.
According to other news sources, the total of ballots left out was even higher at 10,000. The 10,659 ballots were added to the unofficial vote count, bringing the total number of votes cast to 368,990. Bever stressed that poll watchers for both O’Neill Burke and Harris had been informed of the mistake and that they were expected to be present during the counting of additional ballots.
Copyright 2024, NewsWorthy.news
