Grogan directs volunteers during last week's 2020 Election audit
DOWNERS GROVE – Republican Bob Grogan was elected three times as DuPage County's Auditor. After the 2020 General Election, the DuPage County Clerk declared he lost re-election by 75 votes out of 466,167 votes cast. Because of Grogan's concerns about ballots and counting, he asked a judge for a recount. Last week with the help of volunteers, Grogan reviewed the ballots and the review confirmed his concerns.
Officially, the election is now "tied."
Grogan has been updating those concerned about his election via Facebook – and here's what he's been saying for months, followed by an update after last week's review:
Bob GroganMy name is Bob Grogan. Here are some more details on what has been happening. On election night, I led my Democratic opponent by several thousand votes. My lead shrunk with every upload over the next two weeks, but I still led.
Finally, with the last upload of votes 14 days after the election, for the first time I was losing. I lost by 75 votes out of 466,167 votes cast in the race. Making the final posted results 50.01% to 49.99%. That margin is about 2 votes a town in DuPage County or 1 vote for every 12 precincts.
I led on election night, I was still winning for a whole 14 days after the election, until the final upload from the Democrat County Clerk. We started to investigate, we found many irregularities, and then you know what? We got an actual judge to agree and he ordered a full recount. Then that same Democrat County Clerk tried to block me by asking that I put up almost $300k to do that recount.
So back to court we went and the judge agreed that that was excessive and had it reduced to just under $60,000.
To be clear success in this recount isn't some long shot either, the court ruled that "as we sit here today, this election is effectively a tie, and there is every reason to believe that the recount has an equal chance of going either way." The only thing that stands in my way is I need the funds to finish the work.
A little background about me. I am a CPA, a Certified Fraud Examiner, and until the November election I was the DuPage County Auditor. I also was honored to serve my peers to serve as President of the Illinois Association of County Auditors.
In my 12 years in office, I was the first to put a County Checkbook online, first to create a County Transparency Portal, and the first to create a county Audit hotline. My audit findings have resulted in three convictions, numerous terminations, and significant financial savings.
Last year, I uncovered evidence that led to a federal indictment on numerous counts of a Republican elected official. I am sure the other side regrets that the closest race in the County's history was with an anal retentive, stubborn CPA.
With that historically thin margin, I proceeded to request a discovery recount, which is a process where if you lose by less than 5% you can examine one quarter of the precincts’ ballots. Note that Illinois has no provision for automatic recount. Over a two week period of time, with over 40 volunteers, more than 120k ballots were examined.
Some significant irregularities were observed. Hundreds of vote by mail ballots were found to have no judges’ initials. An entire polling place with more than 400 ballots had not a single ballot that had judges initials.
In Illinois, judge’s initials are required by statute to be on every paper ballot. Approximately 10% of the vote by mail envelopes were examined and a handful were found to have a postmark from after Election Day. Ballots must have been mailed by Election Day at the latest according to law here.
The most disturbing issue discovered was after requesting a list of every person that voted, that list proved to be 1,626 less that the total number of ballots. Simply put, that indicates more ballots were counted than people who were listed as having voted. This is 20 times the margin in the race.
We filled a legal request for a full recount on December 24th. The “winner” of the auditor race, Democrat attorney Bill White (who had never conducted an audit in his life) had been sworn into the office of Auditor on December 1st. The recount process requires that the winner be served legal notice, Mr. White avoided being served for about 5 weeks.
Finally, after several hearings and filings from both sides, the Judge ordered a full recount (unprecedented for the second largest county in Illinois). The judge in ruling on only the one polling place with no initials on ballots said, “if the 436 ballots at issue are declared defective, and not counted, petitioner would net 82 votes, which exceeds his opponents 75-vote victory margin and would swing the election results in petitioner’s favor.”
What’s next? The Democrat County Clerk is pushing back against the the findings, denying that the more than 1600 extra ballots are not an issue. The democratic Clerk asked for me to post a cash bond of almost $300k to cover costs of a recount. This is on top of the legal fees and costs needed to put a team in place to watch a recount of almost half a million ballots.
The judge has now reduced the amount to $56,307.25, to be paid by August 27th. On top of those court ordered costs, I still have to pay lawyers and cover the expected team of 30 for three weeks.
I am a forensic auditor, not a conspiracy theorist. Any system rushed during a pandemic with a half a million inputs can reasonably have an error rate of more than 1 for every 6000.
I want to find out the final result after the irregularities have been separated out, be they accidental or intentional. I can’t do it alone. Illinois stacks the deck against anyone trying to look behind the curtain of a very complex election process. Crazy as it sounds, in Illinois if a candidate finds enough discrepancies to overturn an election, the candidate needs put up cash.
Grogan updated his Facebook page with this information on October 7, 2021:
Recount status update: Everyone asks about the "where we stand on votes?" Short answer as to where we stand is there is much that hasn’t been tabulated, so we don’t know exactly (doesn’t help me sleep as you can imagine).
We finished the recount quickly (3 days instead of the 3 weeks they made me pay) for two reasons. One: there were a huge amount of people involved in the effort (special thanks to the +50 volunteers that showed up each day to help me). Two: the judge very recently, for reasons I don’t really understand, limited the scope of what we were allowed to look at.
When we did our original discovery recount last December, we got to look at roughly 25% of the precincts. We found issues, but as with all limited samples we likely didn’t see everything there was to see. The judge ordered a recount because of those findings, but then in the final order limited us to only look for more of what we had already found. Frustrating to say the least, but we soldier on.
We were allowed to look for and found on Monday, as expected, hundreds of Election Day ballots without judge’s initials. No full tabulation has been done as to which way these likely to be thrown out ballots will swing. They have been isolated and locked up. We will know more in a couple days.
We were allowed to look at vote-by-mail envelopes and spent two days going through them. We were only allowed to look for missing signatures and postmarks that showed they were mailed after Election Day. As you can imagine when you look at more than 150k of anything filled out by +150k people other issues might present themselves. The Clerk’s office worked very hard to force us to ignore anything outside those two stated issues, but we pushed back where it was ridiculously glaring. Foremost of these were we (the election judges and our observers) found BALLOTS in with the envelopes.
If you haven’t ever watched the sausage of democracy made, let me paint the picture as to how shocking this was for us. Ballots are almost awarded the status of holy relics in the election process, as you can imagine. I know that judges in polling places and full time election staff have always been very careful about tracking and segregating ballots.
There are whole chain of custody procedures that are supposed to be followed, dual sign offs on sealing tape, tamper proof tags with serial numbers locking cabinets, etc. Some of these ballots were just loose between empty envelopes that were bundled. More were found still in their original envelope (where they were left for the time being).
It wasn’t thousands of ballots, but it was a bit more than my 75 vote loss. We don’t have a tally as to who the votes were for (particularly because so many remained in their envelopes). My guess is these votes weren’t counted, though were likely eligible to be counted back last November.
I have asserted previously that I believed the number of ballots counted by the Clerk is out of balance. She has pushed back hard on that, “nothing to see here keep moving.” Her response has been that the data she provided me was not comparable (despite me asking for comparable data). Well now I ask the awkward question, if we have found ballots how can she have balanced the ballots cast?
We also found dozens of envelopes that were postmarked after Election Day, where apparently the ballots were illegally counted. There were a more than a 100 envelopes with no signature from the voter (though many of these may have been cured with affidavits from the voter, that due diligence hasn’t been done). And there are a handful of other odd issues that I won’t go into at this time.
So to answer everyone’s question, “where does it stand?” The honest answer is we don’t really know. I was asked by a reporter how much longer this process would take and my response was unfortunately the American legal system is very inefficient only surpassed by the inefficiency of the Illinois electoral system.
I lost by 75 votes out of almost a half a million cast eleven months ago. I may have won and I may have lost. At this point I truly don’t know. I am just a licensed CPA and Certified Fraud Examiner who knows enough about elections that I have even authored an election law that was passed in Springfield, but in this humble auditor’s opinion no matter what the outcome of my race is, the Clerk has a lot of questions that need to be answered.
Grogan is asking for donations to support his ongoing 2020 Election challenge HERE: http://www.votegrogan.com/donate/
