The DuPage County Republican Party is requesting a public hearing on election procedures after the County Board voted to censure Clerk Jean Kaczmarek.
Party Chairman Kevin Coyne said the hearing is needed to respond to voter questions about ballots and election transparency.
“In the year I’ve been chairman, it’s clear that there are sweeping concerns surrounding election integrity, specifically vote by mail,” Coyne told the DuPage Policy Journal. “I can continue to pepper the clerk’s office with questions, but these questions are so pervasive that the clerk’s office should publicly start answering them.”
The DuPage GOP requested the hearing an hour after the County Board voted 15–1 to censure Kaczmarek for reportedly refusing to follow accounting procedures and obstructing financial oversight.
One board member opposed the censure, with one abstention and one absence.
Board leaders said Kaczmarek’s actions undermined public trust and put taxpayer dollars at risk, citing missing financial documentation, delayed vendor payments, and nearly $200,000 in legal fees tied to her noncompliance.
The resolution also noted she raised office salaries by more than 40% over five years and refused to meet with finance staff despite a budget shortfall.
Kaczmarek is under investigation by the Illinois Attorney General’s Office for alleged official misconduct involving more than $229,000 in no-bid election contracts and potential violations of state procurement law. The probe followed DuPage State’s Attorney Robert Berlin’s recusal.
In its statement, the DuPage County GOP said confidence in the integrity of local elections is “at an all-time low,” adding that many voters do not trust how mail-in ballots are distributed, collected, or counted.
“It’s abundantly clear that there are a great many DuPage voters (as in tens of thousands!) who do not trust vote by mail voting and who believe games are being played with how these ballots are distributed, collected, and counted,” the party said on Facebook. “General questions about our voter rolls also continue to persist.”
The GOP invited the League of Women Voters and the DuPage County Democratic Party to participate in the hearing, if it is granted.
“We’ve voiced concerns to the League of Women Voters that they’ve shifted from being quietly left-leaning to overtly left-leaning,” Coyne said. “They put their names on the ‘No Kings’ protests, which were overtly partisan. For years we’ve heard the League of Women Voters talk about the importance of voting and free and fair elections. Right now the reality is there’s a significant part of the electorate that doesn’t trust the process anymore. They should be as concerned about that as us, and I would hope they would join us in calling for a hearing.”
Coyne said transparency, not political advantage, is the party’s goal.
“We just want the elections done fairly and accurately,” he said. “And when people lose confidence in the process, that should concern everybody. Whether those concerns are valid or not, maybe they prove to be not valid, but that doesn’t make them go away. We should have a discussion, and it should be open and transparent. And if everything is being done right, the clerk’s office shouldn’t have any reason to avoid such a discussion.”
Election integrity concerns were raised in DuPage County’s Auditor race in 2020, where Republican Bob Grogan lost to Democrat William White by 75 votes after mail-in ballots were counted. Grogan claimed to have identified missing judges’ initials on ballots, discrepancies between registered voters and ballots cast, over 1,600 unaccounted-for ballots, and commingled mail-in ballot envelopes that prevented postmark verification.
“I’ve just heard a number of things from [Bob Grogan’s] race that a number of the ballots looked like they’d been signed by the same person in the same pen,” Coyne said. “We don’t have voter ID, which only exaggerates many of the concerns voters have. Yeah and maybe there’s answers for all this stuff, but when all of it is done in a vacuum, there’s not enough transparency on the process.”
A judge later certified that White did indeed defeat Grogan following a recount.
“We’ve seen numerous races that have changed who won sometimes many days after the election,” Coyne said. “And that too is alarming the people. It just breeds suspicion and the clerk should want that suspicion and these questions just to go away.”
“It’d be different if there were one or two people that were complaining about this,” he said. “It’s clear to me that there are thousands of people in DuPage County that don’t have full confidence in our elections anymore. That should be dealt with.”
Coyne said the issue goes beyond partisanship and reflects a growing concern over public confidence in elections.
“We’ve reached a point in America where a material part of the electorate no longer believes elections are being conducted correctly and fairly,” he said. “That should concern everybody.”
