Dupage Policy Journal

More than 1,300 DuPage County residents relocated months prior to the November 2020 elections yet voted using their old addresses in the county, a four-month investigation by the policy group, Breakthrough Ideas, has found.

Co-founder of the group, former State Rep. Jeanne Ives (R-Wheaton) and candidate for Congress in 2020, said that the number of those violating the state’s residency requirement (1343) is a conservative one.

“We matched the voter registration lists against the national change of address list, a list maintained by the United States Postal Service to see who moved out the area,” Ives said during a Friday morning news conference, where she was joined by lead analyst on the investigation John Morrissey. “In all cases our list contains only voters who moved out of the county, many of them out of state.”

The list does not include those who moved within the county or those in communities that straddled DuPage and another county.

Breakthrough Ideas describes itself as "highlighting the virtue of taxpayer-centric and liberty-focused policy." Ives said that the aim of the investigation, which also revealed other irregulates in the voter rolls and “negligence” on the part of DuPage County Clerk Jean Kaczmarek’s office, was not about overturning the 2020 elections results – even though some races were decided by fewer than 1,343 votes.

For context, Democrat Joe Biden defeated former President Donald Trump in Du Page by more than 87,000 votes.

“It’s about making sure that the 2022 elections are conducted competently and fairly and not negated by voters who don’t live here,” Ives said.

She added that the investigative work by volunteers with Breakthrough Ideas should have been done prior to the election by Kaczmarek’s office, or even after the election when the office knew that voters listed did not match the ballots cast.

“When the clerk was made aware in December that she had insufficient voters listed for the number of ballots cast, one would think she would pour her staff’s attention into doing the type of analysis we have done with a few volunteers working part time,” Ives said. “Her failure to even look into and reconcile the most basic of numbers, let alone understand that her data is corrupted, shows disregard for the seriousness of her duties to secure elections.”

The number out-of-county voters represents only the first of many findings as a result of the investigation. Breakthrough Ideas also found that official voting reports and voting logs from the clerk’s office conflict with each other, that thousands of voters who voted in November 2020 were deleted in subsequent voter lists only seven months later, more than 10,000 voters who have not voted in the last 10 years remain on the voter roll, and personal information of individual voters is corrupted from one report to another. 

Details of these findings will be announced at future news conferences, Ives said, and all relevant information is being turned over to the DuPage County State’s Attorney’s Office.

The DuPage County Clerk's office did not immediately return a call requesting comment.