Dupage Policy Journal

Bob Grogan, who lost the November election for DuPage County auditor by 75 votes has found Election Day data actually shows he won the election. 

The precinct-by-precinct data was provided to Grogan’s team by the DuPage Clerk. On the national level, Donald Trump recently castigated Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for refusing to release similar data.  

In both cases the number of votes cast on Election Day is more than the number of registered voters. 

Grogan said that on Dec. 24, his team filed a petition with the circuit court asking a judge to consider further action after they found there were three precincts where all ballots were missing judges’ initials.

“We found 240 ballots in vote by mail that … were also missing judges’ initials (net pickup for me of 56),” Grogan wrote in a Facebook post. “This was only looking at a quarter of the cast ballots. Note that state statute requires all ballots to have a judge’s initials.” 

Grogan said when his team asked to look at the vote-by-mail envelopes that were received on Election Day to see if they had the proper postmark date, they discovered that the envelopes were mixed with those that were dropped off on Election Day, which meant they couldn’t check the accuracy and validity of the process.

“We also asked for a list of all people that voted and we found that that list had more than 1600 fewer names than the total number of ballots cast in the county,” Grogan wrote in the Facebook post. “Now know that a ‘discovery recount’ (which is what we were doing) is not the process where you see something wrong, object, and it is set aside to rule on the issue. A discovery recount is just us looking at things (never touching, that’s what the election judges were there for).”

Grogan said he also spoke to the clerk’s office about how the new technology for early voting would select the first candidate in every race after 10 seconds, but the clerk’s office cited the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Grogan said this process isn’t done in any of the other 101 counties in the state. He said during the entire process over two weeks, he never saw the county clerk in the office.

“Over 120k voters voted on these machines before the Clerk posted warnings to voters about the problem,” Grogan said.

Grogan said the county clerk made a statement after the discovery recount, saying that everything was fine and nothing had changed.

“The other party is already gearing up their negativity,” Grogan said. “Look, if I lost I lost, if I didn’t lose, then how dare they pretend nothing is wrong. I am not one who promotes grand conspiracies. As a professional licensed CPA I look at audit evidence and if that evidence says something warrants further study or a different conclusion then what are they afraid of?”

Nationally, Trump is seeking the release of lists of registered voters who voted on Election Day and has been rebuffed thus far. 

A similar issue occurred in Detroit on a national level, after a Wayne County Board of Canvassers member, Ned Staebler, said that only 72% of ballots within the county were able to re-counted.  

Staebler’s behavior during the episode resulted in death threats against two GOP canvassers who initially voted against certifying the vote due to uncomfortability before switching their votes amid pressure and upon a promise of an audit. 

In the county, there were several issues, including allowing ballots to be backdated and having poll workers who actively supported Democrats. The two Republicans on the board initially voted not to certify the election and then began receiving death threats and threats of violence.