(The Center Square) – The McLean County State’s Attorney and the Illinois State Police have declined a request to investigate an “election interference” complaint.
Dean Fletcher, an Illinois resident, lodged a complaint with McLean County State’s Attorney Erika Reynolds’ office after several McLean County school districts featured a website that urged voters to “approve” a sales tax referendum on their taxpayer-funded webpages.
“Her [Reynolds] email basically can be summarized with two reasons why they weren’t going to currently take this investigation request that I sent to them. The first one was, more or less, like funding limitations and like budget issues with the McLean County Board. They haven’t allocated specific money for a special investigator,” said Fletcher. “The second part was the case law People v. Ringland (2017).”
In 2017, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that a state’s attorney’s investigative powers are restricted, as their role is primarily to assist law enforcement rather than conduct independent investigations.
“Like, who cares which government law enforcement agency, whether it’s the state’s attorney or the actual police boots on the ground, is doing the investigation?” said Fletcher. “People really misunderstand law enforcement’s role in the country, and there are lots of legal ‘outs’ they can take to avoid actually enforcing the law, which I think we’ve seen that nationally and state level, and unfortunately this is a local example.”
In an email to Fletcher, Reynolds said “it would be imprudent of my office to open an investigation into the matter you emailed me about or, potentially, any other matter unless we were certain no investigatory agency could adequately handle the issues involved.”
Reynolds suggested Fletcher take his complaint to the ISP or the public integrity unit of the Illinois Attorney General’s Office.
“The State Board of Elections website says complaints alleging a criminal violation, such as voter fraud, voter intimidation, et cetera, should be referred to the state’s attorney office of the county in which the alleged violation occurs as the State Board of Elections lacks jurisdiction to commence a criminal prosecution,” said Fletcher. “So, even the State Board of Elections is saying the state’s attorney office is the one responsible for investigating criminal violations.”
The McLean County State’s Attorney suggested taking the complaint to the ISP.
“And they [ISP] said that they are only able to investigate allegations of a criminal nature of elected and appointed officials,” said Fletcher. “Use of public social media for election issues should be referred to the State Board of Elections or Attorney General’s Office. Now, the election code, which defines election interference, is punishable by a Class B misdemeanor, which, in fact, makes it a criminal nature type of violation and crime. Second, they said they can only investigate these criminal violations of elected and appointed officials. And in my complaint, I specifically listed the superintendents of the six school districts that had linked to this website that was promoting and urging voters to vote ‘yes.’ Did they not even read my complaint?”
Fletcher said the website promoting the referendum is obviously controlled by the area school districts because after lodging his complaint with the Regional Superintendent, changes were made to April1Cent.info.
