Retired Judge Eileen O’Neill Burke has added more than three dozen votes to her lead over former prosecutor Clayton Harris III in the Cook County State’s Attorney primary race, with more than 2,000 ballots added to the unofficial count on Wednesday.
According to officials with the Chicago Board of Elections, a total of 2,838 ballots were added to the city’s total for the election, coming from mail-in ballots cast at assisted living facilities and ballots that had been flagged for additional review by election judges.
Of those, more than 2,000 were cast in the Democratic primary for the two candidates in the state’s attorney’s race. O’Neill Burke picked up 1,148 votes in the latest updates between the city of Chicago and Cook County, while Harris picked up 1,109 votes.
Those results mean that O’Neill Burke’s lead now stands at 1,637 out of more than 525,000 votes cast in the race.
O’Neill Burke has received 263,527 total votes between the city and suburban Cook County, making up 50.16% of the ballots cast in the election.
According to Chicago election officials, more ballots could be added to the count on Thursday, with provisional ballot processing scheduled to take place. Those ballots will be evaluated, and those that pass screening will be added to the unofficial tally.
Officials say there are 53,420 outstanding vote-by-mail ballots remaining in the election, but remind the public that only ballots postmarked by March 19 and received by April 2 will be eligible to be counted in the race.
Should current results hold, Harris would be entitled under Illinois law to request a recount, but would have to pay for the recount at his campaign’s own expense.
Illinois does not have automatic recounts in close elections. Rather, candidates can request recounts if they received at least 95% of the amount of votes cast for their opponents, a threshold that Harris meets.