Category Archives: Board of Election Commissioners

Board of Election Commissioners, Ray LaHood

Mitzelfelt firing draws LaHood’s ire

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Rep. Ray LaHood wants Mary Harkrader and Camille Gibson booted off the Peoria City Election Commission for firing Executive Director Jeanette Mitzelfelt, the Journal Star reports. Whether or not they deserve to be ousted is a separate issue I’m not prepared to debate at this time. But I do think the situation is filled with irony.

One of the big reasons touted for why the city election commission is supposedly superior to the way the county clerk oversees elections is that the city election commission is bi-partisan and, thus, supposedly not as susceptible to political interference. But the charge now is that the commissioners acted on political motivations in firing Mitzelfelt. “The Peoria Board of Election Commissioners has never experienced a failure of the public’s trust,” the Election Commission’s website proudly states. Guess they’ll have to change that copy.

But getting back to LaHood. He’s quoted in the Journal Star as saying, “This is the most outrageous political move I’ve seen in a long, long time…. This is absolutely pure politics.” Well, Ray knows a little something about playing politics. Just a couple of months ago, he participated in retaliation against the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee’s deliberate leak of a classified document, then bragged about it to Fox News saying, “If the ranking member wants to play politics, there are some of us on the other side that can play politics, and I’m not afraid to do it.” Now he’s got his sites set on Harkrader and Gibson.

Is retaliation becoming a pattern for Ray?

Board of Election Commissioners, Peoria County

Pens too difficult; must have computers

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I got a card in the mail yesterday from the Board of Election Commissioners. It was instructions on how to use the new voting equipment.

I’ve been voting for a while now in Peoria. My first ballot was on those “butterfly ballot” machines where you punched a hole in a computer punchcard. I was only 18 when I used that for the first time, and even at that tender age, I was able to figure out the complex system of names and punch-holes.

Later, they started using a plain paper ballot and a felt-tip pen. All you had to do was complete the arrow; essentially the instructions were “draw a line next to the person’s name for whom you want to vote.”

Now, we have computers to make our lives easier. So here are the six simple steps for casting a ballot with our new voting equipment. This is verbatim from the Board of Election — I’m not making this up:

  1. Turn the SELECT wheel to highlight your language and press ENTER.
  2. Turn the SELECT wheel to highlight the first number of your ACCESS CODE. Press ENTER. Repeat for each number.
  3. Turn the SELECT wheel to highlight your ballot choice. Press ENTER. The box to the left of the choice changes to red. Repeat for each contest. You can turn pages on the ballot with PREV or NEXT.
  4. Read the Ballot Summary Page carefully. Only after you have made all of your desired choices, press CAST BALLOT from the final Ballot Summary Page to proceed to Ballot Verification.
  5. Read the Paper Verification Page carefully and verify your selections on the printed record. Only after verifying the printed record, turn the SELECT wheel to highlight Accept Page and press ENTER.
  6. After you have verified and accepted all printed pages, press CAST BALLOT to finish voting.

You have finished voting when you see the waving American flag. The printer displays “Ballot Accepted” and scrolls to a blank page to ensure voter privacy.

Pressing the CAST BALLOT button after you have verified all printed pages completes the voting process and records the ballot.

Oh yeah, that’s soooo much easier to understand and execute than drawing a line with a felt-tip pen. Thank goodness for modern technology.