Lake County Clerk Anthony Vega said Joseph Severino will appear on the county’s March 17 Republican primary ballot while his appeal of a ballot disqualification moves through the courts, even though the Illinois State Board of Elections declined to certify him and most other counties removed him.
“(Severino has) a hearing scheduled for tomorrow in the appellate court,” Vega told the Lake County Gazette. “So that decision is still pending. It will either reaffirm the state board’s decision to not certify him as a candidate, or it will state that he’s a certifier.”
Vega noted Severino has indicated he intends to appeal his case to the Illinois Supreme Court if necessary.
There were originally five counties out of 102 statewide that kept Severino on their ballots. That number decreased to four after Ogle County decided Feb. 17 to reprint 21,000 ballots for primary election day to remove Severino’s name.
Severino now appears only on ballots in Kane, McHenry, Lake and Boone counties, while voters in other counties will choose among certified candidates.
“Other counties, even though a small minority, including Lake, decided to proceed with the name on in the event that the courts add his name back to the ballot, and if they decide not to add his name back to the ballot, then those votes would just, it would just not be certified,” Vega said. “It is a really bad situation when it comes to these objections working their way through the court system, but this is kind of where we’re at. It’s an added strain.”
In early January, the Illinois State Board of Elections removed Severino and running mate Rantch Isquith from the primary ballot after their campaign submitted 4,748 valid signatures, 252 short of the 5,000 required for statewide candidates.
The board certified the remaining Republican gubernatorial tickets on Jan. 27, including Ted Dabrowski and Carrie Mendoza; James Mendrick and Robert Renteria; Darren Bailey and Aaron B. Del Mar; and Rick Heidner and Christina Neitzke-Troike.
Vega said keeping Severino on the ballot while appeals are pending was a deliberate choice, a practice that occurs occasionally, though rarely at the top of the ticket.
He described the 2024 primary as particularly challenging. Jericho Matias Cruz was initially removed from the ballot but reinstated after judicial review, forcing the office to redo ballot proofing and testing to start early voting on time. Objections for Donald J. Trump and Joe Biden were unresolved until Feb. 29, after early voting had begun.
“The ballot is not a simple Word document that we just added,” Vega said. “There are a lot of steps to make sure ballots are ready. This is a larger issue, as many objections are spilling over into the early voting period and not being resolved in a timely fashion. This has been the gubernatorial Republican primary, a higher-profile instance in which this has occurred, and some counties decided to proceed without the name.”
Vega said leaving candidates on ballots during unresolved challenges can reduce voter confusion while noting that long-term reforms for Illinois’ election process remain necessary.
“The legislature recently, two years ago, moved up the timeline for petition circulation and petition filing to allow for objections to be resolved in an adequate amount of time,” he said. “What we’re seeing is that this is not happening. We have these objections in the courts bleeding over into the early voting period, which requires a long-term solution. This is the first time it impacted such a high-profile office, but it does confuse voters and needs to be addressed in the near future.”
He highlighted the difficulty of balancing voter access with election integrity.
“Either we hold off on early voting for all voters, or once the decision is made, we stop voting and reissue ballots depending on what that order means,” Vega said. “Our job as election authorities is to provide the least disruptive voting period as possible.”
To illustrate those challenges, Vega explained the limits his office faces once early voting begins.
“I agree with the sentiment that these objections should be resolved prior to voting even starting,” Vega said. “That’s not the reality. It is a bad reality for our offices across the state. It’s a bad reality for candidates. I can sympathize to an extent, but we need to ensure the least disruptive voting process for voters. Quite frankly, I also don’t believe the decision to pause voting for Republican voters only is the right call, because it eliminates the opportunity for those voters to exercise that right.”
Early voting was paused to update ballots and then resumed in DuPage County after the Illinois 1st District Appellate Court reinstated Republican 11th Congressional District candidate Tedora M. Brown, who had been removed from DuPage County ballots. By then, 742 in-person early votes had already been cast without Brown listed.
In contrast, Lake, Kane, McHenry and Boone counties kept Brown on the ballot while her appeal was pending, avoiding the disruption seen in DuPage. Meanwhile, Cook, Will and DeKalb counties removed Severino but not Brown.
The cases of Severino and Brown underscore the challenges counties face with extended early voting, vote-by-mail deadlines and last-minute legal rulings.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Ted Dabrowski criticized the situation as evidence of systemic “chaos” in Illinois elections.
“It’s not as simple as one error,” Dabrowski told Prairie State Wire. “We’ve got multiple ballots, three different ballots running around in Illinois, and that breaks all the requirements by the Constitution of uniformity of ballots. So you can imagine that there will be voters who will be disenfranchised and candidates who were disenfranchised, and that’s a big problem given the election integrity problems we have, not just nationwide but in Illinois in particular, and of course the level of corruption we have here in Illinois.”
Dabrowski’s comments came as he filed a lawsuit against Champaign County Clerk Aaron Ammons, who misspelled Dabrowski’s name on the ballot. Ammons is an ex-con whose wife, longtime State Rep. Carol Ammons (D-Urbana), helped secure a pardon that made him eligible to seek the office.
Dabrowski criticized the inconsistencies.
“Severino is on the ballot in at least five counties, and so that has other major implications for what’s going on here,” he said.
