North Cook News

State Rep. Deanne Mazzochi (R-Westmont) is pushing legislation designed to fight voter fraud by requiring county clerks to remove dead people from voter rolls.

In a virtual town hall gathering, Mazzochi warned that not acting opens the door to voter fraud, especially in the age of expanded mail-in voting.

 “Now there is a joke that in Cook County, you can go to the cemetery to collect votes,” Mazzochi said in a video posted to her website. “And one of the reasons why we unfortunately have that reputation of dead voters, and we even saw this in the last election, the clerk’s office admitted that there were people who applied for mail-in ballots using the names of people who were deceased. It’s because in the state of Illinois, when we are talking about maintaining our voter rolls, we say that the county clerk may take the dead people off the rolls, not that they shall take dead people off the rolls.”

Mazzochi argues it says a lot that Democrats have been hesitant about dealing with the issue.

“To me, particularly in Illinois, there’s a desire to try to increase the use of mail-in balloting – we’ve certainly seen that from the majority party,” she said. “You can’t do that if you don’t have completely squeaky clean voter rolls, because otherwise all you’re doing is creating an invitation for voter fraud.”

Mazzochi has proposed House Bill 2513 as a solution. The measure seeks to have deceased individuals removed from voter rolls.

Late last year, DuPage County State’s Attorney Bob Berlin announced that his office has learned of at least nine different instances of voter fraud tied to vote-by-mail ballot requests from the dead.

"House Democrats used COVID as an excuse to lower vote-by-mail standards, and wouldn't enact critical steps to prevent voter fraud,” Mazzochi told Patch.com. “It is bad enough that they ignored many House Republican recommendations to preserve the integrity of this fall's election. But it is utterly embarrassing that they wouldn't agree to ensure our voter rolls are clean enough to keep the dead off the rolls.”

Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed vote-by-mail legislation (SB 1863) pushed by Democrats into law last spring as Public Act 101-0642. It cost millions to mail ballot applications to an estimated five million voters, and for the Secretary of State's Office to mail multiple follow-up reminders to those who had not returned their application. Critics also charge the measure fails to address such safety concerns as protecting against ballot tampering or voter fraud and vote-by-mail ballot harvesting.

The Heritage Foundation has published an Election Integrity Scorecard that compares the election laws and regulations of each state and the District of Columbia that impact the “security and integrity of the process to the Foundation's best-practices recommendations.”