Oct. 29, 2012

By Jayette Bolinski

SPRINGFIELD – Illinois’ teacher pension system could go broke if the state does not figure out a way to fully fund the system soon, the leader of the retirement system and others have warned again.

Illinois’ Teachers’ Retirement System is seeking $3.4 billion from the state for its portion of the pension costs for fiscal year 2014. That’s about $500 million more than the system sought from the state for the previous fiscal year.

“TRS faces the real risk of future insolvency because of insufficient state funding over the last 30 years,” said Dick Ingram, executive director of the Teachers’ Retirement System, who  previously has made the same dire prediction.

“TRS absolutely will be able to meet its obligations to retired teachers in the near future, but we cannot guarantee retirement security for future generations of teachers unless the state meets its total obligations.” Continue reading →

Oct. 24, 2012

By Jayette Bolinski

SPRINGFIELD — Opposition to a proposed pension-related constitutional amendment that will go before Illinois voters Nov. 6 is creating strange bedfellows — from public employee unions to good-government groups that agree the question is not worthy of a change to the state’s constitution and does nothing to address the pension crisis. Continue reading →

Oct. 22, 2012

By Jayette Bolinski

SPRINGFIELD – Voters take note: judicial elections matter.

That’s according to observers around the country who monitor judicial elections and the influence of campaign spending on the courts.

Chances are a judge has touched your life or the life of a loved one in some way, they say, and that’s why it’s important for voters to research judicial candidates — whether they serve on the U.S. Supreme Court or a local circuit court — before heading to the polls.

Take, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court’s June ruling that upheld President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Or, closer to home, how was your last run-in with a judge over a speeding ticket? Continue reading →

Oct. 4, 2012

By Jayette Bolinski

SPRINGFIELD — When it comes to Illinois coal, a lot is riding on the outcome of the November presidential election between Democrat President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

To put it simply, if you’re for coal in Illinois, then you can’t be for Obama, said Phil Gonet, president of the Illinois Coal Association, a Springfield-based group that promotes Illinois coal.

“Obama’s record to us is quite clear. He’s no friend of coal,” Gonet said, noting that Romney recently made a campaign stop at an Ohio coal mine and that his staff has talked to the National Mining Association. “We believe there will be a place for coal in energy policy in a Romney administration, so it’s real clear to us.”

Romney brought up coal during Wednesday night’s presidential debate, which focused on domestic policy, saying he supports the industry.

“By the way, I like coal. I’m going to make sure we can continue to burn clean coal,” the former Massachusetts governor said, telling Obama, “People in the coal industry feel like it’s getting crushed by your policies.”

There’s a reason the coal industry feels that way, said Jack Darin, director of the Sierra Club Illinois chapter. Illinois already has begun moving the direction of a clean-energy economy.

“I was surprised by how frank Mitt Romney was about his opposition to clean energy and his allegiance to fossil fuels and sources of the past,” Darin said. “I think that’s what his policy proposals suggest he would prioritize, but I did not expect him to be so blunt about it because I don’t think that’s what most Americans want.”

The Sierra Club has endorsed Obama for another four years in the White House. During Wednesday night’s debate, Obama said he and Romney agree on the importance of increasing domestic energy production.

“But I also believe that we’ve got to look at the energy sources of the future, like wind and solar and biofuels and make those investments,” Obama said.

Obama has proposed several rules among different federal agencies that make it difficult to mine coal or burn it to fuel power plants, Gonet said.

“We don’t believe that any of these rules have any solid scientific basis in terms of improving health or safety, and we believe they’re designed pretty much solely to put coal out of business. So this is a key election for us,” he said.

Coal, once king in Obama’s home state of Illinois, has been in a slump for decades because of tightening environmental regulations. Illinois coal is “dirty,” or high in sulfur. Amendments to the Clean Air Act in 1990 required power plants to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions, which essentially meant they had to install expensive “scrubbing” equipment or get their coal from other states, such as Wyoming, where the sulfur content is low.

Illinois coal production was cut in half, and mining jobs dwindled from 10,000 to 3,500.

However, coal is making a comeback in the Land of Lincoln, Gonet said, because it has become more economical for some power plants to install scrubbers and burn Illinois coal. In 2011, 85 percent of the coal produced in Illinois went out of state. Coal production nationwide is down, but it’s on the rise in the Illinois Basin, a region that includes Illinois, western Indiana and western Kentucky.

More Illinois coal is going out of the country, too. According to the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, about 7-million tons of coal, was exported in 2011.

Illinois’ coal production peaked in the 1920s when everyone relied on the fossil fuel — homes, businesses, the railroads, the electric industry and more. Illinois produced about 100 million tons of coal each year for a few years in the ‘20s.

It dropped to about 60 million tons per year in the 1980s and 1990s but held steady. After that it dropped to 30-some-million tons a year but is on the rebound. Illinois coal production rose 13 percent between 2010 and 2011, Gonet said. In 2010, the state mined between 40 and 45 million tons and is on tap to mine more than 50 million tons in 2013.

Mining jobs are on the rise, too. About 4,400 people work in the industry now. Three new mines are expected to be operating by the end of the year, and another is under construction in Hamilton County. Of the 23 coal mines in Illinois currently only two have unionized labor.

“That’s why this election is so critical, because Obama has regulations out there that will make it harder for us to not only mine coal but to send it out of the country,” Gonet said.

Darin said there are other ways to create energy-related jobs in Illinois, such as building wind farms that cut down on pollution. Illinois has about 20,000 wind jobs, in part because of a 25-percent clean-energy goal 2025. A key federal tax incentive for wind developers expires at the end of the year.

“Illinois clean-energy companies have said they’re going to have to scale back or perhaps even stop developing if that rug is pulled out from under them. And Romney has committed to doing that,” Darin said.

“I think last night we saw a very stark choice between continuing down that path to jobs and a healthier environment or going back to being reliant on dirty fossil fuels.”

Sept. 26, 2012

By Jayette Bolinski

SPRINGFIELD — Efforts to purge voter rolls in three financially strapped southern Illinois counties are over for now, but state election officials say they are continuing efforts to clean up Illinois’ lists of registered voters.

Alexander and Massac counties at the southern tip of the state culled more than 4,000 voters from the rolls for reasons, such as death and moving.

“Having good, clean election rolls avoids any possibility of people attempting impersonation voting,” said Ken Menzel, an attorney with the Illinois State Board of Elections. “While it’s not a huge problem from what we can tell, keeping your rolls clean limits the opportunity for mischief along that line.”

Voter purges, which occur every other year in Illinois counties, also help keep down costs associated with running elections. Clean voter rolls mean precinct officials have a better idea of how many voters to expect, how many ballots to print, how many machines to have on hand and how many election judges to pay.

“If you can get a few hundred people out of your voter rolls, you can consolidate people tighter into precincts, so you’re only paying to serve people who are still there and might show up to vote,” Menzel said.

Three counties in far southern Illinois, Alexander, Massac and Pulaski, were unable to purge their voter rolls as frequently as other counties because of budget constraints, causing their voter-to-over-18-population percentages to get out of whack.

Often in counties where families stay put for a long time, the percentages hover around 80 percent; more transient areas, such as large cities and suburbs, have much lower percentages. Once the percentages approach 100 percent or higher, election officials want to know what’s going on.

In May, Alexander County was at 117 percent, and Massac County was at 106 percent. By early September, Alexander dropped to 80 percent and Massac dropped to 88 percent. Alexander County was able to cull more than 2,300 voters from its rolls that in May stood at more than 7,400 registered voters. Massac culled more than 2,000. Its rolls showed more than 12,600 voters in May.

Much of the expense associated with the purge comes from postage costs when officials mail letters to addresses to confirm if the voters who are registered still live there. The State Board of Elections stepped in to help with postage costs — about $4,000 worth— in Alexander County. The board also assisted Massac County with completing its purge.

Purges had to be completed at least 90 days prior to the election. Pulaski County, which stands at about 115 percent, was unable to complete its purge by the Aug. 6 deadline but expects to finish after the election.

Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Civil Justice Reform Initiative at the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation conservative think tank, said there are other low-cost steps counties can take to try to root out duplicate voter registrations, such as examining the Social Security Master Index for deaths and state corrections records to take felons off the rolls.

“It doesn’t cost a lot of money to do comparisons between voter registration rolls and other county and state records like the DMV to find people who have notified DMV, for example, that they have moved out of state,” said von Spakovsky. “Are they doing all those steps? If not, then they’re not using all the things that are available to them.”

Von Spakovsky, who was a member of the Federal Election Commission for two years and also worked at the U.S. Justice Department on voting rights issues, said it’s crucial that states work to cut down on duplicate voter registrations.

“When names remain on voter registration rolls of people who have died or have moved away, that provides the means to commit voter fraud,” he said, citing a recent True the Vote study that revealed that an examination of 10 percent of New York’s voter lists turned up 1,500 people registered both there and in Florida. Of those, 31 voted in both states.

“That’s after just checking 10 percent of the voter roll. There you had people taking advantage of being registered in two states, and you had fraudulent voters,” von Spakovsky said. “Does that sound like a lot of votes? Well maybe not, but if you have a close election and those happen all the time, it could make a difference in the election outcome.”

The 2002 Help America Vote Act required states to maintain a statewide voter database, which prompted Illinois to beef up its database and track duplicate registrations from one jurisdiction to another. Officials started flagging, for example, someone who registered to vote while in college and later registered to vote in the city they moved to after graduation.

Starting in 2010, Illinois election officials were able to track names and birth dates to weed out duplicate voters. In the first couple months of doing that, they cleared out about 62,000 duplicate registrations.

Menzel said he expects to see voter registration percentages — registered voters versus U.S. Census data population figures — go back up heading into the November election because of efforts to register voters on college campuses and elsewhere. An official in Champaign County, for instance, recently told Menzel someone brought in 1,600 voter registrations for students from the University of Illinois.

“It’s not going to be a surprise with this being a presidential election year for jurisdictions to all of a sudden creep up, and, to the extent that they purge again in 2014, most of the jurisdictions will roll again back down to a reasonable number,” he said.

Another factor that can skew the percentages is inaccurate U.S. Census figures. Predominantly black communities are undercounted. East St. Louis, for example, has had high voter-to-population percentages, and officials there continue to do purges of the voter rolls. It currently is at 102 percent.

“If they’ve done a heavy registration drive in a community that’s undercounted in the census, their numbers will look bad not because they have fictitious people but because they have people who weren’t counted in the Census,” Menzel said.

“You have to take the figures with the appropriate grains of salt for demographics and all that sort of thing.”

Oct. 2, 2012

By Jayette Bolinski

SPRINGFIELD — It’s probably going to be dismal year for absentee voting by military members overseas, as evidenced by the low number of requested ballots for the November election.

But one expert says he is fairly certain it’s not about the ongoing drawdown in U.S. troops overseas, or simple disinterest. It’s more about a systemic problem with voting access in the U.S. military.

“The Department of Defense does a lot of things incredibly well. They keep us safe, they protect our freedoms, they’ve done a tremendous job of protecting this country,” said Eric Eversole, founder and director of the Military Voter Protection Project. “But when it comes to other issues, things that aren’t directly related to war-fighting, that’s when they don’t do a very good job often.”

The traditional avenues civilians have for registering to vote, such as signing up at the nearest driver’s services office and registration drives on college campuses, for the most part don’t exist for military members, who frequently move around and work at locations with restricted public access.

A 2009 law — the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment, or “MOVE,” Act — was supposed to help make it easier for military men and women overseas and citizens who live abroad to vote in U.S. elections. It’s part of the 1986 Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, which also guides overseas absentee voting.

But a Defense Department inspector general’s report in September showed numerous problems with military voting, including installations lacking offices where service men and women can register to vote or pick up absentee ballots. According to the report, investigators tried to contact 229 voting-assistance offices but were able to reach only 114 of them. The MOVE Act requires that all military installations have the offices.

“We concluded the Services had not established all the (voting assistance offices) as intended by the MOVE Act because, among other issues, the funding was not available,” the inspector general’s report reads.

It also noted the offices probably are not the best way to reach young members of the military because they are used to communicating online and using the Internet for information.

The whole situation is complicated, Eversole said, noting that most military installations do not allow groups to hold voter registration drives on bases.

“And I think there’s some long-standing cultural hurdles inside of the military where there often are questions as to whether service members should participate in the political process,” he said.

His group tries to find other ways to remind service men and women to register or seek an absentee ballot, including by advertising in military publications and using the Internet.

“It’s a complicated process, and after years of being disenfranchised, I think there are a lot of voters who say, ‘Why bother?’” he said. “What we try to do … is really try to create a positive message for our service members that emphasizes they ought to participate and that we really want to her their voice in the election, and then provide them with the tools to do so.”

In Illinois, as of Sept. 22, the 45^th day before the Nov. 6 election, the state’s board of elections had received 11,063 requests for absentee ballots for military and overseas voters. On the 45^th day in 2010, the state had received 16,589 absentee ballot requests. That’s about a 25 percent drop, which, coincidentally, is about what Eversole expects to be the average drop nationwide this election.

Illinois elections officials don’t know what’s behind the decrease. In 2010, they received about 2,500 additional absentee MOVE requests after the 45-day mark.

“Whether or not the number of people in the military in Illinois has gone down that are serving overseas this year compared to what it was to two years ago or four years ago, which all could be a factor, that could show a decline in the numbers,” said Rupert Borgsmiller, director of the Illinois State Board of Elections. “All we have is raw numbers. We can’t speculate on why the numbers are down.”

The Illinois Army and Air National Guards had about 4,000 members deployed overseas in 2008, more than 1,200 in 2010 and under 1,000 in 2012. It was unknown how many service men and women in the rest of the military are considered eligible to vote in Illinois.

Eversole said that, ultimately, the important thing is to make sure military members are election ready – that is, they have access to a ballot. Whether or not they vote is up to them.

“I think that’s some of the source of frustration. The MOVE law was supposed to make it easier. What it’s done is make us hope an avalanche of absentee ballots come in in these final weeks before the election,” he said. “That’s not good election management.”