By Salem Chicago News Staff
CHICAGO — Illinois opened early voting statewide, and DuPage County — one of the largest and historically best-administered Republican-leaning counties in the state — was forced to shut down every early-voting location within hours of opening after voters discovered their personal data had been corrupted in the county’s poll books. Incorrect birth dates, including at least one voter listed as born in 2018, prevented residents from checking in at polling sites. The county clerk’s office then offered two competing explanations: a general technical glitch during voter registration data uploads, and a separate court case involving the Kane County Regional Superintendent of Schools affecting approximately two DuPage precincts. Illinois Republican Party Chairman Bob Grogan, who was personally turned away from his polling location, says the county’s shifting accounts expose a failure of basic competence.
Grogan is a licensed Certified Public Accountant and Certified Fraud Examiner who served three terms as DuPage County Auditor from 2008 to 2020 — a tenure during which he put the county’s checkbook online before any other Illinois county and established a public-facing government transparency portal. His institutional knowledge of DuPage County election data systems lends particular weight to his assessment of what went wrong.
Grogan described a routine early-voting attempt that turned into an exercise in bureaucratic confusion. “I just tried to vote at my early voting location here at the Downers Grove Village Hall and was turned away by two very nice election judges,” he says. Election judges told him the situation was out of their hands and that all sites would remain dark indefinitely. “They said the polls are closed from now until they reopen — hopefully tomorrow,” Grogan says. He noted that roughly ten ballots were cast at the Downers Grove site before the shutdown order came down, raising chain-of-custody questions for those votes. The competing explanations from the clerk’s office only deepened his skepticism. “They can’t keep their story straight,” he says. “They’re scrambling around because they just obviously aren’t competent.”
Stephanie Trussell, Republican candidate for Illinois State Representative in the 42nd District, was among the voters personally turned away when she attempted to cast her ballot at DuPage County’s main early-voting location. Her experience was especially jarring: county poll books had recorded her birth year as 2018, flagging her as a minor. “They turn the screen around. It says that I was born in 2018,” she says. “I voted in March. Why would they mess with my birthday?” Trussell and several other voters were eventually permitted to re-register and vote, but the resolution did little to answer the larger question of how the data error occurred. “We finally got to vote,” she says. “But it just didn’t make sense.”
The shutdown affected all DuPage County early-voting sites and came as Cook County’s early-voting window was not yet scheduled to begin, drawing a sharp contrast between two of the state’s most populous counties. DuPage sits at the heart of AM 560’s suburban Chicago listening area and serves as a critical electoral battleground for suburban and exurban Republican voters. Whether the data corruption resulted from a routine upload error or something more deliberate remains an open question — one the county clerk’s office has yet to answer definitively. Illinois State Board of Elections and DuPage County Clerk officials should be contacted for official statements, and the chain of custody for the ten pre-shutdown ballots requires independent verification before publication.
