Early voting gets underway in Chicago as election officials anticipate higher turnout and fewer problems

As early voting began in Chicago on Friday, city election officials said they are working to ensure there are enough election judges ready to staff polling places across the city on Election Day and are anticipating more voters will cast ballots for the general election than the low number that showed up for the primary in June.

“Primaries can be tough for voters,” Chicago Board of Election Commissioners spokesman Max Bever said. “Many people don’t want to necessarily choose a party. Gubernatorial primaries can be tough in Illinois for voter turnout, but it does improve for the general election. So we are expecting a higher turnout for November.”

The first day of early voting in Chicago came one day after the feisty first broadcast debate in the race for Illinois governor between Gov. J.B. Pritzker and GOP challenger Darren Bailey. Bever noted the two locations for early voting are the city’s Super Site, at 191 N. Clark St., and election headquarters on the sixth floor of the 69 W. Washington St. building.

Early voting has begun in many other counties throughout Illinois and will open in suburban Cook County on Wednesday.

[ Attention Chicago voters: Find your new polling place for the 2022 general election on Nov. 8 ]

While election officials Friday encouraged voters to make a plan to cast their ballots early before the Nov. 8 election, challenges for Election Day still lingered.

The city has reduced by nearly 100 the number of polling places that will be open Election Day, a result of reducing the number of city precincts by almost 40% and redrawing those boundaries.

The result is that approximately half of the city’s voters will be heading to different polling places than they’ve cast at before. The change, done a month before Election Day, has raised concerns there will be some confusion come Nov. 8. Voters looking to find their precincts and polling places can find it at the Chicago Board of Elections website.

Those challenges aside, Bever said the precinct consolidation should alleviate the election judge shortage that has existed for years in Chicago. While the board needed nearly 11,000 election judges for the primary election, it needs only about 6,450 election judges to fully staff Chicago’s voting precincts in November. The board expects to hire more than the necessary number this fall, he said.

[ Want to vote early in the election? Here’s where to cast your ballot in Chicago and the suburbs before Nov. 8. ]

“So the June 28 election, that election judge shortage did contribute to some delays in polling place openings. Given that we are looking to overstaff, we’re hoping that all precinct polling places will be opened right at 6 a.m. on Election Day through 7 p.m.,” Bever said.

The board is still hiring poll workers for early voting and for Election Day. Poll workers start out making $17 an hour for early-voting shifts and $230 on Election Day, he said. The board is particularly interested in hiring bilingual workers in languages such as Spanish, Chinese, Hindi/Gujarati/Urdu, Polish, Korean and Tagalog.

[ Illinois general election 2022: A guide for voters on the midterms, including where to vote, key dates and highest-profile issues ]

Despite the cold, rainy morning Friday, Chicago voters showed up at the Super Site to be among the first in the city to cast their vote in person.

Monique Babbs, who traveled to the downtown site from Hyde Park, emerged from the maze of blue curtains and stepped up to a row of machines ready to process her ballot.

“I wanted to get it out of the way,” she said.

Babbs also said she shared some of the concerns that have been raised about the changes in polling places for Election Day, especially for voters like her 87-year-old mother who needs physical assistance to get to polling places. Babbs said she plans to bring her mother back to the Super Site on a day with better weather. While parking isn’t readily available, a bus line will give her and her mother direct access, she said.

Making polling places accessible to disabled voters is one area that the Chicago Board of Elections has struggled with in the precinct consolidation. The Tribune also reported Thursday that only 9% of polling places are compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, down from 20% in the primary election.

While all of the early voting sites and the Super Site are ADA-compliant, the board will miss its target of having all polling places accessible by the 2022 general election as set out by a settlement agreement in 2017, amended once already in 2019, with the U.S. Department of Justice.

Chicago mayoral candidate Willie Wilson has been highly critical of the board’s decisions since the Tribune first reported on the precinct consolidation this past summer. Wilson has even filed a lawsuit to try to stop the changes.

Wilson on Thursday said Mayor Lori Lightfoot should try to stop the new map from being implemented.

While Lightfoot declined to comment on Wilson’s statements, Bever said the board “by law could not wait” to make the changes and said the City Council fight over redrawing the city’s ward map left only a few months to “take on a quite massive redistricting process.”

Later Friday, Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton rallied, along with Secretary of State Jesse White and civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson, on the plaza at the Thompson Center before marching to the early voting site at Lake and Clark streets.

While Pritzker doesn’t plan to cast his ballot until Nov. 8, he and Stratton encouraged people to take advantage of voting options, such as early and mail-in voting, that have been expanded in Illinois but are facing new restrictions in other states.

Pritzker, noting that his own polling place has been relocated, said officials need to make sure city voters are aware of changes to voting locations.

”We’ve got to make sure people know where to go to vote,” he said.

Chicago Tribune’s Dan Petrella contributed.

Kinsey Crowley is a freelance reporter.