On Monday, the executive director of the Illinois Democratic Party admitted that the number of volunteers for Tuesday’s primary election has plunged because of the coronavirus. Mary Morrissey told Hill.TV, “That is the biggest crisis in terms of the election right now is we need election judges. It’s critical that we have election judges tomorrow.” She stated, “In terms of efforts to protect volunteers and protect workers, the election authorities have made sure that the workers have gloves, that there’s hand sanitizer.”
Morrissey said “one of the biggest challenges for the election authorities” was that nursing homes typically used for polling places were unavailable, although the fact that schools had closed permitted more use of them as polling places.
On Monday, just after Illinois State Board of Elections announced that unlike Ohio, Illinois would hold the primary as scheduled, Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who has endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden, asserted, “We have to have our elections continue, in my opinion. This is the right thing to do. Our democracy needs to go on. If we cancel these elections, when would you have an election? I feel good about the decision to have the election go on tomorrow. We do believe it’s safe. We’ve certainly consulted experts, and we think that the election will go on just fine,” as The Chicago Sun-Times reported.
Matt Dietrich, spokesman for the Illinois electoral board, said the reason the primary would remain was that much early voting had been completed 504,000 early votes had been cast and 294,000 mail ballot were sent to voters. He stated, “At this point, there is no date in the foreseeable future when we can expect greater safety with any certainty,” adding, “in-person voting is a comparable transaction to picking up a takeout restaurant order or shopping at a grocery store.”
Prizker said, ““There really have not been large crowds in many places at any given moment,” surmising that time spent at polling places “isn’t very much.”
The Chicago Tribune noted:
There are 155 pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee in July coming out of Illinois — 101 of them to be selected by primary voters from throughout the state’s 18 congressional districts, and 54 decided by the statewide results. Big wins by Biden in Illinois, as well as Florida, Ohio and Arizona, which also vote Tuesday, could all but make Sanders mathematically ineligible to overtake the former vice president in the race for the 1,991 convention delegates needed to win nomination.
The Tribune added that it was “imperative for Sanders to make a stronger showing in the Chicago suburbs than four years ago, encouraging support not only from women voters but also generating a larger turnout among his younger supporters who in earlier states have not shown up in the record numbers he promised.”
John Jackson, a visiting professor at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, opined, “The pattern for us on Tuesday night will look a great deal like Michigan last Tuesday night. That similarity with another big urban, manufacturing and agricultural state leads me to believe that the outcome will be very similar in Illinois.” He said he thought Biden could win every single county in Illinois, adding, “The momentum has made a huge difference, there’s no question. [Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders] just got clobbered in Michigan.”