Esprit de Pol                                         

And you thought the days of people returning from the grave to vote in Illinois — or in this case, to register to vote — were over?

Thomas B. Littlewood, a journalism professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has studied Illinois elections since his days as a Chicago Sun-Times reporter, found some surprising voting patterns in last November's election.

In a piece for Policy Forum, published by the U of I's Institute of Government and Public Affairs in cooperation with the Cooperative Extension Service, Littlewood compared voter registration figures from the State Board of Elections to voting age population numbers from the 1990 census. Lo and behold, he found that in some Illinois counties the number of registered voters met or exceeded the number of residents 18 years of age and older!

In Putnam County, the census report listed 4,232 residents in that age group, while the board of elections reported that exactly 4,232 voters were registered in 1992. Only the most idealistic could swallow such a coincidence.

But even optimism about voter involvement couldn't explain the phenomena occurring in Alexander and Cumberland counties. In Alexander, 7,561 voting-age residents were counted in the census, while there were 8,046 registered voters. (Election day turnout in November was 59.7 percent of those 18 and over.) And in Cumberland, 7,680 eligible voters were counted, although 8,226 were registered. (Election turnout was 70.1 percent of those 18 and over.)

As Littlewood concludes (drolly), it appears likely that registration rolls in those counties were not purged of deceased voters. Illinois politics being what they are, we should be so lucky to have such a simple answer to the confusion. �

36/July 1993/Illinois Issues