It might seem a little rough to begin with homework, but today’s essential read comes from Charlene Bielema, Shaw Local’s Sauk Valley Media editor.
The headline alone is powerful: “60 dead people found on Illinois jury panel, triggering constitutional challenge.” But the details are even better.
There’s trouble brewing in Whiteside County, where a recent panel of 200 potential jurors included at least 60 dead people, one of whom expired the year Michael Jordan’s Bulls won the NBA Finals. The first time.
As Char detailed, the discovery, which started earlier this year as Whiteside’s jury practices over 30-plus years came under deserved scrutiny, suggests “a statewide problem that systematically excludes younger citizens from jury duty in violation of the Sixth Amendment.”
It’s definitely worth reading the entire story (tinyurl.com/WhitesideJury), but essential to understand the role of the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts, which uses several sources to compile jury lists: voter registration, unemployment insurance, Secretary of State driver and identification records and Person with a Disability cards.
The prevailing issue is that not all of those sources are automatically pruned. A driver’s license comes with an expiration date. When those licenses expire, for whatever reason, it’s relatively easy to remove those names from the list.
Voter registration doesn’t expire. The upside is that if you’re like my parents, who haven’t moved since 1978, there’s no barrier to participating in democracy. Voters like me, with four “permanent” addresses in Illinois since 2007, have to update their registration with each change. The downside is when registered voters don’t pull a ballot – or if they move or die – there’s a chance their names are still on an old list.
The jury composition process involves merging, comparing and eliminating certain data fields. So even if I hadn’t re-registered to vote after moving from Ottawa to Gurnee in 2009, I might’ve eventually been removed from the La Salle County rolls after obtaining a new license with a Lake County address.
Framing this situation as an election security issue might be useful for politics, but doing so without offering statistics about votes attributed to the deceased is disingenuous. It is much more seriously a constitutional concern about trial rights – don’t get me started on the broader jury duty debate – as well as another entry in the list of bloated government inefficiencies.
Few love the idea of a central government database, state or federal, tying everyone’s everything into a single record. Yet it boggles the mind that despite every modern technological advancement and increasing requirements to prove who we are, these types of clerical challenges remain, posing viable threats to our supposed founding ideals.
Lawmakers – who most certainly cannot feign surprise – might consider acting in response.
• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Local News Network. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.
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April 21, 2026 at 10:04AM
Illinois Delivered 