McHenry County Blog

There were 57 signatures on McHenry County’s Protect Marriage petitions that did not pass muster when the County Clerk’s Office examined them.

Either the office staff could not find the names on the voter registration roles or could not read the signatures.

Yesterday, six volunteers went out in the stormy morning rain—with traffic signals down—to the McHenry County Government Center to take a second look at the validity of the signatures that were rejected.

Chief recruiter Irene Napier reported,

We found 23 that we could probably revalidate.

That’s 23 out of 57.

Every signature that can be rehabilitated adds more than one to the number needed to pass the sample test. It could be worth 10 or 15 signatures in the mathematically complex formula in the software used by the State Board of Elections.

One she cited was for Bruce Adams of Richmond. The address on the petition read, “10011.” When the local volunteers, who included three Crystal Lakers besides Napier:

Ann and Tom Benard, plus Linda Piper, and
Cheryl Hamnmerand of Wonder Lake,

looked at Adams’ voter registration card, they found his address was "10009.”

Whether it was a typo or something else, it obviously was the same person.

I’m not an attorney, but Protect Marriage attorney Mike Lavelle is the one who won the 1990 re-count for State Rep. Penny Pullen by arguing that the voter’s intent was what counting, even if the chad was left hanging on the punch card.

Another example was a person whose name could not be read. By cross-referencing the address, which was written clearly, the volunteers found the individual.

Hammerand told McHenry County Blog that

copies of the petition with the ineligible voters (were) checked and we looked up the cards if we could decipher the name. If we couldn't, we went to the clerk and she would lookup the address.

Often, we found that the person had moved, and not reported it. A few were women who did not change their name on their voter information, and we found a few that for sure were eligible. The clerks were very helpful and tried to check names because they were hard to read, too.

We figure about 20 were voters, but the lawyers will have to determine in they are eligible.

Here's a specific from Hammerand:

Trying to identify a obvious husband and wife on the petition, where the husband is registered, and the wife is not, they checked the address and found the wife has been registered at that address in her maiden name and had not bothered to inform the county clerk of her name change.

“About dinner time last night I got a phone call asking if I could round up volunteers to report to the Government Center at 9:30 the next morning,” Napier told McHenry County Blog.

“The usual ‘dependables’ offered to rearrange some of their plans to be available for the task.

“It was heartening to witness the willingness of people to rearrange schedules to meet the task, to hazard the storm of a decade to be there on time.”