Around 10,000 missing votes have been added to a Democratic primary tally after being overlooked in what election officials call a “human error.”
The mistake, if unchecked, could have made all the difference in Chicago’s Cook County state’s attorney’s race. The primary pits retired appellate court justice Eileen O’Neill Burke, widely seen as a Democratic moderate, against university lecturer Clayton Harris, seen as more progressive.
On March 19, polling day, Harris was nearly 10,000 votes behind, according to an early estimated tally. By the end of Wednesday, after the 10,000 votes were added in, unofficial results had narrowed down to a tiny margin. O’Neill Burke was ahead by just 1,598 votes, with 50.16 percent of the poll, against 49.84 percent for Harris.
The Chicago Board of Election Commissioners said on Sunday there were 54,191 outstanding mail-in ballots that had been sent out to voters yet to be returned. Officials don’t expect to receive them all. The official result won’t be known until the April 2 deadline.
Discovery of the 10,000 additional ballots sparked questions about election integrity on social media against the backdrop of Donald Trump‘s continued refusal to accept the result of the 2020 presidential election. The former president, and presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, is continuing to claim the contest was rigged against him despite this allegation being repeatedly rejected by both courts and independent election experts.
Cook County, IL is again showing just how the democrats control elections using mail-in ballots. November will see this same strategy repeated times 1000👇 https://t.co/lEzhRuBAFy
— Chuck Soltys (@ChuckSoltys) March 28, 2024
Another poster, called BASEDLAYER, said: “They wait til they figure out the number of votes they need and then they do the ballot dump. Just like the 2020 election.”