When Gov. Bruce Rauner signed a bill on Aug. 28 to automatically register Illinois residents to vote, the man in charge of the office that oversees elections in suburban Cook County said the signature was the final piece in a long sought tool to “clean up” voter rolls in the county and elsewhere. Illinois’ automatic voter registration (AVR) “makes our voter rolls cleaner and more inclusive, streamlines the process of voter registration, cuts costs associated with paper-based voter registration and is a natural registration fraud fighter,” Cook County Clerk David Orr said in a statement. The AVR bill passed both the Senate and House in May. Illinois is the 10th state, plus Washington, D.C., to approve AVR.
“Illinois is overdue for a cleaning of its voter rolls,” Orr said in a statement. “Hundreds of thousands of Illinoisans remain registered at addresses where they don’t live, and we can do that cleaning quite simply and quite easily with AVR.”
James Scalzitti, deputy communications director at the Cook County Clerk’s Office, told the Cook County Record that AVR will make Illinois voter rolls more up-to-date and more accurate.
“AVR helps us tremendously to filter out the voters on the rolls who have moved, have died or whose information is just outdated,” he said.
Full Article: Illinois automatic voter registration bill signed into law; Cook clerk says will enable cleanup of voter rolls | Cook County Record.