A fresh count Friday evening of more than 11,000 ballots mailed in by Democratic Chicago voters in recent days further shrunk retired Appellate Judge Eileen O’Neill Burke’s lead in the primary race for Cook County state’s attorney, but not nearly enough for her opponent, Clayton Harris III, to overtake her.
After a total of 12,634 Republican and Democratic ballots were tabulated, O’Neill Burke’s edge shrank to 6,786 votes, down from the roughly 8,200-vote lead she had on Thursday. While Harris has been chipping away at O’Neill Burke’s lead as more mail-in ballots are counted, he needs a significant share of outstanding Democratic ballots to succeed. How many of those ballots come back and how many will bend in Harris’ favor remain open questions.
Throughout the day Friday, Chicago election workers split between the sixth floor and basement of the government building at 69 W. Washington St. to begin the painstaking work of tallying tens of thousands of mail-in ballots that arrived on Election Day and the day after.
The workers did so under the eye of note-taking poll watchers from both campaigns as 30 election judges from both political parties removed ballots from envelopes, initialed each ballot and sorted them by ward into padded blue zippered containers emblazoned with the Chicago Board of Elections logo. Chicago’s election board has received 27,485 mail-in ballots since Election Day — 14,714 via drop boxes and 7,009 from the U.S. Postal Service on Tuesday and another 4,027 via mail on Wednesday. An additional 1,120 were delivered via mail on Thursday, and 615 were delivered on Friday.
City election officials said another 13,000 mail-in ballots will be scanned and totaled Saturday, both Democratic and Republican.
How many mail-in ballots are still coming?
According to the latest numbers shared by city and suburban election officials, there are approximately 90,000 outstanding Democratic mail-in ballots.
Overseas, out-of-state or military members’ ballots could still trickle in. Others may just be working through the mail. As long as those ballots are postmarked by Election Day, March 19, or earlier, they will be counted through April 2.
Election authorities still expect thousands of ballots to arrive, with the vast majority coming from voters in the city. However, they do not anticipate all 90,000 outstanding ballots to be returned.
“We still expect several more thousand (mail-in ballots) will be coming in over the next few days,” Max Bever, spokesman for the Chicago Board of Elections, said Friday morning.
But some of those may be postmarked too late. In that case, they will be rejected and not counted, he said.
“With this low turnout for this last primary election, as well as whether or not these ballots are properly postmarked, we ultimately might see a lower return rate than we’ve seen in previous (elections) and that we might be a little bit closer to, say, 40,000 vote-by-mail ballots returned back out of those outstanding ballots,” Bever said.
How well does Harris have to perform to overtake O’Neill Burke?
Of the 11,000 votes returned Friday night, about 56% went to Harris. While that’s a good sign for the progressive’s campaign, he would need to pull in about 73% of forthcoming city votes to overtake O’Neill Burke’s current lead — and that’s assuming the remaining suburban ballots return in his favor.
A slim majority of Thursday night’s batch of mail-in votes from the suburbs went to Harris. If his campaign is to win it, any outstanding suburban ballots would also need to continue that trend.
Whether that happens, however, is still difficult to discern. From recent elections, local progressive campaigns typically have done better than more moderate opponents when it comes to mail-in ballots. In the 2023 mayoral runoff, Brandon Johnson’s campaign scooped up around 60% of the votes that trickled in after election night. For Harris to win, he’d have to do even better than that.
When will the race be called?
For the state’s attorney’s race, the picture “should be much clearer by early next week, when the majority of vote-by-mail ballots have been returned in Chicago and counted as well as returned in suburban Cook County and counted by the clerk’s office,” Bever said.
County officials will also “continue to count mail ballots over the weekend as they come in and will have another update for the media early next week,” spokesman Frank Herrera said. So far, the county has only posted its counts from mail ballots received Tuesday and Wednesday.