Poll workers at some Cook County early voting sites sent home voters who were still in line about 7 p.m. Monday, but officials said Tuesday that election judges made that decision because not everyone was social distancing and preparations needed to get underway for Election Day.
Sally Daly, a spokeswoman for Cook County Clerk Karen Yarbrough’s office, said voters in line at eight to 10 polling locations were waiting but could not cast their ballots. Anyone who was inside the facility at 7 p.m. was allowed to vote, Daly said, but others were sent away.
Election judges at the county’s 53 early voting sites planned to close at 7 p.m. to prepare for Election Day, which means reprogramming equipment, cleaning and stocking up on PPE, Daly said. She said voters who are still in line at 7 p.m. on Tuesday will be allowed to vote, unlike what happened at some locations Monday.
At least one attorney’s group challenged what happened, implying the decision could have contributed to voter suppression.
“The Cook County election judge manual itself states that anyone in line when early voting ends for the day has the right to cast their ballot and must be allowed to vote,” Ami Gandhi, senior counsel for the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, said in a statement. ” But tonight, voters came out in the cold and waited for hours to cast their ballots, only to be turned away without explanation. That needless barrier undoubtedly disenfranchised Cook County voters.”
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Edmund Michalowski, Cook County’s deputy clerk of elections, said in a media call Tuesday that his office did not intend to infringe on anyone’s rights. He said some of the county’s early voting sites stayed open until 10 p.m. so everyone who had been in line could vote.
But at certain sites, he said, “the judges felt threatened, and they felt very uncomfortable because people were crowding and they weren’t practicing social distancing.”
Michalowski said his office contacted “several dozen” voters Tuesday morning who had been referred by the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and felt they had been turned away. Michalowski said his office inquired what it could do to help those voters participate Tuesday but said he decided not to reopen the polls Monday night after the incidents were reported.
“As an election authority, we can’t open up a polling place for a particular group of voters over another group of voters,” he said. “We have to be fair and impartial, but we also have to be caring and I think that’s what our goal was.”
On Tuesday, Gandhi, of the Chicago Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights, said her concerns remained.
The organization received about 70 calls from affected voters, she said. Volunteers answering phone calls and monitoring these reports Monday night estimated that “hundreds” of voters could have been turned away too early.
The issue was relayed from numerous early voting locations, and multiple voters called to say there were lines of up to 100 people or that would take hours to get through, she said.
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“The reason that we were concerned about this is because of the widespread nature of the problem and the fact that it seems a large number of voters were affected,” Gandhi said. “We don’t know sitting here today whether all the voters who were unfairly turned away were indeed able to vote.”
In addition to local polling places, the county will have seven supersites available on Election Day, Daly said. Those locations include the five suburban courthouses in Cook County — Markham, Rolling Meadows, Bridgeview, Maywood, Skokie, as well as Union Station in Chicago and a location at 69 W. Washington St.
Any voters with a mail-in ballot must also bring it to a supersite location, Daly said.