Peoria County voters are casting votes by mail and early in person, more than any other election.
Election Commission says it expects nearly a third of voters will have already cast their votes by Election Day. As of Monday afternoon, a total of 3,000 Peoria County residents voted early in person. Commission Executive Director Tom Bride says he’s not surprised by the spike.
“Because it’s the first time we’ve really had it in a presidential election,” Bride said.
He says his office mailed out 5,800 ballots, most of which he expects will be returned. By comparison, the most vote-by-mail participants was in 2014 with about 4,900 completed ballots.
The high voter participation comes in a year where a presidential candidate made unsupported claims about a “rigged” election system, coupled with a data breach over the summer.
Despite the increased paranoia, Bride says the only thing keeping him up at night is the sheer volume of voter applications his office is processing.
“We don’t have a very big staff, so it can be almost overwhelming sometimes when you get in 900 vote-by-mail applications in one day a big box, on top of the probably 2,500 people requesting online.”
Bride says there are too many checks and balances in place for any form of “rigging” to go unseen.
Illinois has more than 100 election jurisdictions, where nonpartisan judges oversee the ballot processing. At most, Peoria County sees one or two instances of voter fraud, where a single voter submits a ballot twice, in some cases by accident, Bride said.
Concerns about cyber security stem from a June cyber-attack. The Illinois State Board of Elections discovered in that hackers had accessed data that contained the personal information of more than 100,000 Illinois voters.
Bride insists that he’s not worried that will pose a threat to the election process, either.
“The equipment that does the tabulation is not hooked to the internet, it’s all standalone. So you couldn’t hack the voting tabulation software if you wanted to," Bride said. "You’d actually have to have physical access to it, which you can’t.”
The window for online voter registration has closed, but residents can still register in-person at polling places during early voting and on Election Day.