Lake Co. Clerk Responds To Concerns Over Sharpies Used On Ballots

Press release from The Lake County Clerk's Office:

Nov. 10, 2020

The Lake County Clerk's office is receiving many calls in response to media reports about the use of marking pens or Sharpies to mark ballot choices. Lake County Clerk's Chief Deputy Todd Govain spoke with Kyle Thomas, Director of Elections from the Illinois State Board of Elections, to confirm that the ballot marking pens provided in the Lake County's election voting sites are the ones recommended by ES&S, our ballot tabulating equipment manufacturer.

Please be assured if you received a paper ballot in the voting site, used the provided pen or the one you brought to mark your choices, and the tabulator accepted your ballot, your ballot was counted. If there was an issue with the way your ballot was marked, the tabulator would have displayed an on-screen alert giving you the opportunity to correct the issue before your ballot was deposited in the ballot bin.

If a Sharpie was used on a vote by mail ballot and did bleed through to the other side of the paper, Lake County's highly technical ballot tabulating equipment is able to read the voter's intended choices. No ballots are ever discarded.

After thorough testing of our ballot tabulating equipment before the November election, both the DS200, used in the voting sites, and the DS850, used for the vote by mail ballots, were able to read all marks made with a pencil, blue ink pen, black ink pen or provided ballot marking pen even if the oval was partially filled, had just an "X", or a checkmark.

For more information on Lake County Clerk services and up-to-the-minute election news, visit LakeCountyClerk.info, follow us at twitter.com/LakeCountyClerk, join our page at facebook.com/CountyClerk, or call 847-377-2400.

This press release was produced by The Lake County Clerk's Office. The views expressed here are the author's own.