Fighting the Status Quo, a Tale of an Early Victory

State law allows the County Clerk to also act as the County Recorder in counties with a population less than 60,000.  Kendall County exceeded that mark several years ago but the County Board has allowed the Clerk to continue as the Recorder and continue to collect the salary for both offices.  But on March 20, 2012, the voters will decide if the Clerk will continue to be our Recorder.

In 2008 the Clerk & Recorder created a website to provide the public with free images of every document recorded in Kendall County since 1986.  Click here to see the web page that describes this free website.  I have attached screen shots in case these pages get changed.  The Clerk discussed the website and related problems with identity theft in a 12/24/2009 interview with the Oswego Ledger (click here for the article).  She acknowledged that the documents contained social security numbers but said she decided to first upload the documents to the website and then remove the social security numbers to expedite getting the documents online.

After the documents were online, the Clerk instructed her staff to start removing the social security numbers because of identity theft: “The way the economy is, people are doing crazy things”, the Clerk said.  “They are taking the numbers because they think it will help their personal and financial situation somehow.”   

The Clerk admitted that identity theft was an issue back in 2009 but she did not take the website down or even put security procedures in place.  Instead, she instructed her staff to work on removing the social security numbers “in their spare time” and set a goal to have all social security numbers removed by 2015.  

That’s not good enough.  So, I decided to fight and took out ads to inform the public that the social security numbers and signatures of thousands of Kendall County citizens were still available on the Recorder’s website.

Now finally the Clerk has taken the website down, acknowledging it was in response to a political ad (my ads!).  But the damage has been done.  The website had no security or tracking, so there’s no way to know whose social security number and signature were obtained by identity thieves during the 3 years that the website was up. Social security numbers don’t change.  Identity theft will ALWAYS be an issue for the thousands of people whose identity was compromised by the Kendall County Clerk & Recorder.  But the real kicker is that it never had to happen in the first place.  There is no requirement for any Recorder in the State of Illinois to provide online document images, which is proven by the fact that the website is now down!

(Please note that the issue of the DD-214's in the article relates to those documents being physically mixed in with public records and filed on public shelves.  The article does not make that clear.  Click here for a better account of the issue with DD-214's.)

I took on a huge battle when I chose to run to be Kendall County’s first elected Recorder.  You can imagine that several Kendall County political insiders are NOT happy with me right now.   But I am in this because I know the records (I work with them for a living), and it's the right thing to do for my County and the future quality of the Recorder's office.  I am not in this for the money, as I said I will do the job for $30,000 a year.  And it sure isn't for glory; has anyone ever heard of a Recorder before my fight started?

I have to win the election AND convince the voters that the Kendall County needs a separately elected Recorder.  The election is still several weeks away, but I am proud and thankful that I have already made a difference for the people of Kendall County. But it’s not over yet.  I will continue to fight for Kendall County’s right to have a dedicated Recorder.  We must have a Recorder that understands the importance of the records.

Please help me and Vote No to the Status Quo!  Vote NO on the Recorder referendum.  A NO vote on the referendum splits the office so that we will have a separate Recorder.

www.JerryBannister.com

Note:  I am attaching a PDF of my first two politcal ads in this campaign.  They both recently ran in the Countywide section of the Kendall County Record Newspapers and were 1/2 page in size.

I am also attaching a couple "before" pictures I took of the books containing these DD-214's placed on open shelves.  The old books (plural!) are now gone, along with numerous more modern books that contained all the DD-214's from 1986 to early 1994.  I am also attaching a picture of the spot where FOUR older discharge books used to be.

Thanks for reading.

Jerry Bannister