Elections board will be ‘toast’ without new computers by 2018 elections, official says

SPRINGFIELD — Illinois’ ongoing budget problem has left the Illinois State Board of Elections in a financial hole so deep that agency officials claim they can’t afford the new computers they need to handle the number of candidates filing petitions to run in next year’s elections.

Ken Menzel, general counsel for the board, said there are approximately 4,000 active campaign committees for 2018 and without at least $25,000 to replace obsolete equipment, the voting lines will be exceedingly long next November.

Even if Senate Bill 6 — which would provide the board with $20.4 million in funding — were to become law, agency officials argue they would still need additional money to incorporate automatic voter registration legislation and update hardware and software as needed.

Election officials are also warning that the agency could be left vulnerable to hacking and might even be forced to “unplug from the internet” unless it can pay $9,000 for antivirus protection that is already way past due.

“The state is two years into operating without a budget,” Menzel said. “In that time, the only money we’ve received has been the stopgap money we got in fiscal year 2017. It’s left us limping along, and without a budget, there’s no money to move around to cover even small things.”

Menzel said it’s hard to estimate how old the computer system is because the agency has “so many servers doing different things.” Just last year, foreign hackers were able to penetrate the system and swipe personal information from voters.

Menzel suggested the idea of having people come into an office and file on a computer as opposed to online was far-fetched.

“We have terminals in both offices to do that kind of filing, but it would be a large inconvenience for people not in Illinois or Springfield,” he said. “Without internet service, we would be toast.”

The $20.4 million appropriation is part of a $37.3 billion budget recently passed by Senate Democrats that also includes $5.4 billion in tax hikes for fiscal year 2018, which starts on July 1 and ends June 30, 2018. The state expects to generate roughly $32 billion in revenues for the next fiscal and the proposed tax hikes were said to be aimed toward avoiding deficit spending.