Lake County Gazette

Like many of his Republican colleagues, Illinois state Rep. David McSweeney (R-Barrington) wants immediate action over the Secretary of State’s Automatic Voting Registration (AVR) system breach that allowed nearly 600 non-citizens to be mistakenly registered to vote.

“It’s disgraceful that non-citizens were registered to vote in Illinois,” McSweeney told the Lake County Gazette. “We don’t need more useless legislative task forces and committee hearings. We need a full, immediate investigation by federal law enforcement authorities.”

Early reports are that at least 574 non-citizens were registered through the AVR program, which automatically registers citizens to vote when they apply for an Illinois driver’s license or state ID card. Of that number, the Illinois Board of Elections has confirmed that at least 19 of those non-citizens actually cast votes in 2018, prompting a growing number of GOP lawmakers to call for an immediate investigation.

McSweeney typically holds a no-tolerance position when it comes to any form of political corruption. In the wake of multiple recent federal corruption probes in Springfield, he introduced a bill that would "add five years of imprisonment to the sentence imposed upon a defendant who, at the time of the commission of the offense, was a member of the General Assembly and who is convicted of a felony relating to or arising out of or in connection with his or her service as a member of the General Assembly."