This blog post was held up by an unforeseen circumstance. Not only was I busy building a woodshed the last two days, I was waiting for final results in the election of our my representative in Illinois’ 76th district, where incumbent Democrat Frank Mautino was running against Republican challenger Jerry Long. Frank is unofficially ahead by about 342 votes out of more than 34,000 votes cast. Long is not conceding and reportedly is considering a recount. The election will not be certified until November 25th. I’m surprised.
The week before the election I was talking politics to the guys at choir practice.
“You been getting fancy mailers from Jerry Long?”
“Yeah,” my baritone friend said. “Where do you suppose he’s getting the money?”
“Has to be the Republicans. They must think he has a chance of winning or they wouldn't be putting money in this late.”
“I can’t imagine,” piped up the tenor. “When has Frank ever had a serious challenge?”
“It’s been since the Unions were mad at him for bringing the WalMart distribution center to Spring Valley, maybe eight years ago.”
“Who ran against him then?”
“Don’t know. Nobody I knew.”
I don’t know Jerry Long. He is a truck driver that has never been elected to anything to my knowledge, although he may be smart and capable. You couldn’t tell from the glossy mailers. On the other hand, I know Frank Mautino as both a key player in the House and a moderate. He knows the budget and is fiscally conservative. Besides that he answers phone calls, returns them, and has a staff, both in Springfield and Spring Valley, that does the same. Couple that with the fact that he listens, realizes when concerns are important to those contacting him, and measures policy implications and you have the recipe for a good elected official regardless of party. I was disappointed in his vote against same sex marriage, but I have never been a single issue voter. If Frank was in trouble something was definitely going wrong. Turns out he was in trouble. Maybe still is. And he has company in the Democratic party.
I worked as an election judge Tuesday in Ottawa’s 12th precinct. I always wanted to be part of the process and after I retired did just that. It’s just my second election so I’m still learning. This day was radically different from my first experience, which was the spring primary. Last Tuesday the polls were busy all day. Second only, the veteran election judges say, to 2008 when Obama was elected. I was a poll watcher for the Democrats that day in Naplate. I remember the excitement, seeing all the young voters participating in their first election. Tuesday was busy, but it was a different mood. It was serious, even somber.
We had voters waiting when we opened the doors at 6:00 a.m. and a voter in a booth as we took all the others down and locked the doors at 7:00 p.m.. Including the hour we spent setting up the polling place the day before, the hour we spent preparing before opening, the hour counting after closing plus delivering the ballots made the whole effort nearly a sixteen hour task. I think I’ll make about $170 for the entire deal, which included a three hour training in late October, and doesn’t account for the vegetable tray I bought as my contribution to the group’s nourishment. I joke with my wife that my earnings for this election and the last will be only money I earn all year. If so, I’m working for less than minimum wage.
Ottawa precinct 12 was paired with Ottawa 4 in the Lion’s Club on Ottawa’s North Side. It’s a good polling place, plenty of space, clean, well lit, good bathrooms, kitchen off the back though we had little time to eat, not that we complained. Being busy at the polls beats a slow day all to heck. We had a steady stream of people through the building all day. Ottawa 4 had a little better turnout than us at 52%. 364 of our 738 registered voters participated in Tuesday’s election for just under 50%. It was like presidential turnout. We were surprised.
I live in the precinct I worked, so Tuesday was a chance to be with neighbors, meet new people, and put names with faces. We were evenly balanced; three Republicans and three Democrats, and we followed the many rules that govern voting without disagreement or issue. I worked most of the day next to a high school senior participating in a program of our local County Clerk that recruits and trains teen age election judges to involve them early on in the process. She was a hard worker and attentive to detail, and there are plenty of details that require attending.
Most of the stress comes from determining when voters must cast a provisional ballot, filling out the right affidavit forms, and determining why a voter who shows up is not among those listed in our precinct. Help is just a phone call away, and we had experienced judges who knew their stuff. The process was made easier for us by the new opportunity given voters to simply go the County Clerk’s office, register, and immediately vote. I think that’s a great new wrinkle to Illinois voting, which bucks the trend nationwide of throwing up obstacles to voting in the name of eliminating voter fraud. I’m pretty confident, being on the inside of the voting process and working with the kind of smart and conscientious people that sign up to work elections here, that there is little or no voter fraud in LaSalle County. Why not extend a well run process so that every possible person eligible to vote can do so?
I was struck all day at how much voting means to us. A young woman comes in late, makes sure her husband is in the book, votes and hurries home to watch the kids so he can make it to the polls in time.
“Bring the kids. We don’t care. We like to have them here.”
“You might, but we have three pretty rambunctious kids. We want to take our time in the booth. Hard to do with those rascals underfoot.”
Old couples in walkers came to vote. We brought them chairs when they had to wait in line for a booth. Our two precincts had eight voting booths and many times during the day they were full. We switched jobs during the day; from looking up voters in the four preprinted books of registered voters and giving them their application to sign, to initialing the ballots and giving instructions on voting, to numbering and spindling the ballots, to helping voters insert their ballot into the machine. Each and all of us saw every voter at some point in the process. Sitting at the poll on election day and watching your neighbors file past gives you a real snap shot of your neighborhood. I realized our neighborhood, our community, is more diverse than I realized. I like that about Ottawa. No one side of town is dominated by good or bad housing, we’re mixed up by income, by age, by ethnic group. We’re still fairly white but slowly we are being joined by more people of color making their homes among us.
I was explaining the ballot, the security sleeve, the process to an older African American man who paid more attention than most. I had a standard rap I repeated a hundred times or more.
“It’s a two sided ballot, so remember to flip it over and vote both sides. When you’re done please put it back in this cardboard sleeve with the green initials facing up when you put it in the machine. Use any booth against the wall.”
The African American gentleman looked at me closely. “So when I get to the booth I take it out of the sleeve? Just how does this work?”
“Yeah. You darken ovals with an ink pen next to the name of candidate you choose.” We had little pads of examples to show people how to mark the ballot that we rarely used. I grabbed one and showed him how, blackening the middle circle across from one in a set of three fake candidate names.
“Make sure you only vote for one candidate in a race. Although if you over vote or fail to vote the machine will let you know at the end.”
He thanked me. From his questions I was pretty sure it was his first time voting. I love to see people get involved. We need everybody, especially young people, to get involved and stay involved. When we say half of those registered vote is good turnout, we have a long way to go reach excellent participation in government. If we lose interest in voting government it will only get worse, and we need it to get much, much better.
A woman came in late and found she was in the wrong precinct. She had moved, thought her voting privilege followed her automatically to her new address (in the same town) and was frustrated. She was a member of the Laborer’s Union, still in her work clothes.
“Where did you work today?” Many of our local trades people travel considerable distance to get work.
“Homer Glen.” I left early, got into a bunch of traffic, made it here and now I find out I can’t vote. That’s just the kind of day I had.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a flagger. I run the sign for road work.”
My co worker, the election judge with all the moxie, was on the phone with the County Clerk's office as we were speaking straightening out her situation.
“OK,” she said. “You can go to the courthouse, you’ve got almost a half hour, and they’re going to take care of this address change and you can vote there right after.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Because by God, I’m determined to cast my ballot in this one.”
That’s the way this election went. People were seriously interested in letting their feeling be heard through the ballot box. I was surprised by the results. Heavy turnout, especially in our area, usually favors Democrats. Being a Democrat, I had hoped the turnout meant we were seeing through the simple arguments put forth by the governor’s candidate who has never been elected, never introduced a bill, never worked the floor of the house or senate, never seen a well meaning policy initiative create unintended consequences that needed correction, and for al we know has never struck a compromise with his peers in order to reach a common goal. But that was not the case.
Ottawa 12, my precinct which is neither a Republican or Democratic stronghold, voted for Jesse White by 60%, chose Lisa Madigan handily over her opponent, barely endorsed Topinka over Simon, and voted overwhelmingly yes to increasing the minimum wage. Yet Rauner received 201 votes as compared to Quinn’s 140, which pretty much mirrored LaSalle County’s total vote of Rauner at 56% and Quinn with 39%. My friends and neighbors came to the polls to vote Quinn the Democrat out of the Governor’s mansion. In scanning LaSalle County’s precinct votes, in the rare cases where Quinn did carry a precinct, he did so usually by only single digits. There are some precincts in LaSalle County which historically vote very heavily Democratic. They didn’t do so Tuesday. Voters in LaSalle County, apparently Democrats and Republicans alike, came to the polls with something to say. It made me wonder how the woman in the Laborer’s Union who runs the sign really voted. What voters in my precinct, LaSalle County, and Illinois said fairly convincingly is they don’t want Illinois to be lead by a Democratic governor.
Those are my friends and neighbors. They’re good people and I respect them. If Rauner is OK with them I’m willing to give him a chance. We have no choice of course but to do so, and if it all goes to hell we can vote him out in four years. But if you’re going to be involved you have to be involved all the way. I’m going to watch closely and stay involved over the next months and years, tell my elected representatives what I think of various bills and issues, and hope for the best. Who knows? It could work.
When I was just getting to know how much state government meant to communities, in the early eighties when I was a new director of a not for profit serving troubled kids that depended, as most do, on state dollars to fulfill its mission of helping kids and families, Jim Thompson, then Jim Edgar, were governors who contributed to the quality of life in Illinois by making good things happen. It’s been done before. They were good governors because they were smart and pragmatic. They saw what needed to be advanced and worked with Democrats to advance those things. Pragmatism, when accompanied by smarts, is a great quality. We have to hope history repeats itself.
Stay tuned, and please stay involved.
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