It's official ... Vote tallies are in
PRINCETON — Did you think the election was over three weeks ago? Well, it wasn’t, but it is now.
Last week, Bureau County Clerk Kami Hieronymus had to compute the final tally of how Bureau County voted, and now the results are official.
Bureau County voters still picked Barack Obama to be the 44th president of the United States.
In Bureau County, Obama picked up 17 more votes, giving him 8,889, or 51.8 percent of the vote, defeating John McCain, who was chosen by 7,911 voters. In addition, 158 voters chose Independent candidate Ralph Nader; 59 voters chose Libertarian candidate Bob Barr; 50 voters chose the Green Party’s Cynthia McKinney; 42 voters chose Constitutional Party candidate Chuck Baldwin; and four voters chose New Party candidate John Polachek.
Hieronymus said there were no big changes in any of the results because of absentee ballots that arrived after election day.
“We only had 27 late absentees that we had to count,” she said.
While the 27 ballots is the most the county has seen, they didn’t have much of an impact overall.
Hieronymus said her office had to wait for 14 days after the Nov. 4 election for any late ballots to come in. But even then, not all of those ballots were counted.
“They have to be postmarked or dated the day before the election for us to count it,” she said. “Some of it was postmarked after the election; some of it was dated after the election; so we couldn’t count those.”
In other races, Sen. Dick Durbin maintained his edge, picking up 14 votes for a total of 10,291, or 61.6 percent of the vote, over Steve Sauerberg.
In the 11th District seat vacated by a retiring Rep. Jerry Weller, R-Morris, Bureau County voters gave State Rep. Debbie Halvorson, D-Crete, the nod. Final totals showed 6,905 votes for Halvorson, or 52.9 percent of the vote, to 41.5 percent for Republican Marty Ozinga and 5.6 percent for Green Party candidate Jason Wallace.
In the 14th District, Rep. Bill Foster earned a two-year term, counter to the desires of the voters in three Bureau County precincts. Foster picked up one vote among late voters, but Jim Oberweis still took the county by a vote total of 203-167.
In the 18th District. Rep. Aaron Schock, R-Peoria, won the seat being vacated by the retiring Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Peoria, defeating Democrat Colleen Callahan and Green Party candidate Sheldon Schafer. In the final tally, Callahan and Schock each picked up two votes in Bureau County, making the final total 1,988 for Callahan, 931 for Schock and 87 for Schafer.
On a local level, Sen. Gary Dahl, R-Granville, earned another two-year term. Although opponent Steve Stout picked up four additional votes to Dahl’s two, Dahl was still the choice of Bureau County voters, by a margin of 4,184 to 2,472.
Nothing changed in the two Bureau County Board races, either.
Republican Joe Bertetto of Sheffield picked up one absentee vote in his victory over Democrat Richard Constantine, also of Sheffield, with a 361 to 205 vote. Bertetto will replace Marcus Throneburg, who did not run for re-election.
In the other contested race, Michael Kohrs, a Democrat from rural Princeton, picked up two more votes in his victory over incumbent Josef Vasquez, with a final total of 287-165.
On the referenda issues, the request to make DePue a home rule unit picked up two affirmative votes, making the final total 400-128. The creation of the Walnut Fire Protection District also picked up two votes in favor, making the final total 781-209. The Prophetstown-Lyndon-Tampico Community Unit School District referendum for $5.5 million in school building bonds vote remained the same, at 53 opposed to 12.
On the statewide constitutional convention question, the final Bureau County tally was 11,609 opposed to 4,099 in favor.
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Some voters across the county were surprised to receive only a federal ballot when they showed up to vote on Nov. 4. About 93 voters in the country received a federal ballot, which allowed them to vote on only the presidential, Congressional and Senate races.
Bureau County Clerk Kami Hieronymus said that voters receive federal ballots when their addresses don’t match up with her office’s records.
“A lot of times it ends up that they just have not communicated with us what their new address is when they’ve moved,” she said. “We’ve tried to contact them, tried to get them to respond to us, tried to get them to refer an address of where they are at, and if we don’t hear from them, they go into what we call a suspended file, where they’re only offered the federal ballot when they go in to vote.”