Coronavirus: Hey Wisconsin, Don't Make Illinois' Election Mistake

CHICAGO — Dear Wisconsin: I know we don’t all get along during the NFL season. But this Illinois guy needs you to hear him out: Canceling your election probably will save lives.

There's an unspoken truth about Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker's decision to forge ahead with the March 17 Illinois primary — against the urging of the Chicago election board and others — at a time when bars and restaurants were serving their last cocktails and meals before a statewide shutdown, and three days before he ordered people to stay-at-home to slow the spread of the new coronavirus.

Our election probably got people sick.

At the time, the governor said he was in a position to make a bad choice or a less-bad choice. He decided the election was too important to cancel. And his administration made it clear the governor doesn't want to get challenged on that. On election day — when a Chicago election board spokesman bravely called out the governor's administration for rejecting calls to either postpone voting, as Ohio's governor did, or abandon the election day model in the name of public health — Pritzker's people even angrily took to Twitter to accuse the guy of playing politics.

Now, in fairness to Pritzker, he doesn't have time to second guess himself.

The governor has plenty on his plate as the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in our state skyrocket.

Friday, there were 488 new cases and five more fatalities than the day before.

But folks in Wisconsin engaged in a heated debate over whether to forge ahead with the April election as scheduled still have time to make the less-bad choice.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot didn't dodge the issue at a Friday news teleconference. She offered a brief post-mortem on Illinois' primary that might help elected officials elsewhere who are gearing up for an election day.

"There’s no doubt standing up an election, and really at the start of the closures where we were at the very early stages of educating the public about this virus, was probably the most difficult circumstances an election could have been conducted under," she said.

In the week or so before the St. Patrick's Day primary here, Lightfoot said conversations about whether the city election board was ready to handle a mid-pandemic election was "a heck of an experience and not for the faint of heart."

"I hate to give advice to anybody in another jurisdiction. But I think the thing other jurisdictions with elections coming on line in April and May and June, you just have to think about all the pieces you take for granted in setting up an election," Lightfoot said.

She gave examples: Many election judges are senior citizens who are most vulnerable to COVID-19. Many polling places are located in senior citizen facilities and schools.

On election day in Chicago, there was a "tsunami" of normally reliable election judges who dropped out the day before voters went to the polls after the governor announced plans to close all sit-down restaurants. Dozens of privately owned polling places located at nursing homes refused to host voters.

"So, you really have to break down the component parts of the election into its pieces, and figure out whether or not you’ll be able to perform at a level that brings credibility and legitimacy to the election given all the pieces of the election that are going to be impacted. That’s again the big takeaway that I have."

Lightfoot didn't address whether voting day in Chicago contributed to her city's new status, along with Detroit, as America's new COVID-19 hotspots.

Indeed, a few days earlier, a City Hall spokesperson sent me a note saying the election's influence on the spread of coronavirus isn't a "correlation that we've tracked at the city of Chicago. You may want to reach out to the state to see if they have that data.”

Neither the Illinois Department of Public Health nor the governor's office responded to interview requests. So that's a conversation for another, less stressful time.

I'm not an epidemiologist, but public health statistics in Ohio and Illinois 10 days after each state made a different decision on whether to send voters to the polls seem to make it hard to rule out that bringing people together to vote may have had a negative impact on public health.

As of Friday, in Ohio there were 1,134 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 19 deaths. In all, 20,149 people were tested. In Illinois, public health officials reported 3,026 confirmed coronavirus cases and 34 deaths after testing 21,576 people. The per capita rate of testing is roughly the same in both states. Yet, Illinois has nearly three times the confirmed COVID-19 cases.

We might never know if a single day of crowded polling places and infected voting machine touch screens caused the virus to spread faster in Illinois. There's no point placing political blame.

What exists is an opportunity for our neighbors to the north to prove their often alleged superiority to us by considering election day options and voting alternatives to protect the public health.

Mayor Lightfoot had some thoughts on that. Once we get past this pandemic, it's time to consider better ways to improve voter accessibility. Vote by mail and maybe even casting electronic ballots might be the way to go in future elections, she said.

You Cheeseheads don't have to wait until next time to err on the side of saving lives.

Politics can wait.