* If you click here you’ll see the latest TV ads for Dan Proft’s Liberty Principles PAC. There’s quite a lot of them. And almost all the recent ones (at least 30 of them) feature a woman speaking to the camera identified as “Kathleen, single mom.” The woman is actually the Illinois Opportunity Project’s Director of Communication Kathleen Murphy. That group was co-founded by Proft.
State and federal authorities are trying to find out why 1,500 absentee ballot applications were left in a Rock Island post office box for three weeks. Michelle O’Neill reports.
Rock Island County Clerk, Karen Kinney, says one of the first tips about a potential problem with absentee ballot applications came from her own mother. Voters also started to call her office asking, “Where’s my ballot?” Kinney called the sheriff, state’s attorney, and the Illinois Attorney General for help. She learned that a Dekalb woman from the Illinois Opportunity Project rented the Post Office box. The project is a Chicago-based non-profit, co-founded by Dan Proft who’s a radio host and former Republican candidate for governor. [Emphasis added]
Co-founder Pat Hughes said his organization has done nothing wrong.
“We’re doing a vote-by-mail program,” Mr. Hughes said. “We’ve delivered thousands of applications in Rock Island County and throughout the state.”
While Ms. Kinney said the 1,500 absentee applications were piled up at the Rock Island Post Office on 11th Street before being delivered last Thursday and Friday by a man, Mr. Hughes refutes there was any voter suppression on behalf of his organization.
“They’re (applications) being picked up and delivered every single day,” Mr. Hughes said. “Any comments on voter suppression are false. If those statements are coming from the Rock Island County clerk or any other Democratic elected official, they are politically motivated.”
Mr. Hughes said the Illinois Attorney General’s Office has made many inquiries and demands over the last week of his organization related to Rock Island County and other counties, but he said it has done nothing wrong.
Hughes said the Illinois Opportunity Project mailed applications to voters on Oct. 11, and picked up the returned applications from the Rock Island Post Office on Oct. 26, after receiving inquiries from law enforcement. Hughes says the group didn’t break any laws by not grabbing the applications sooner. He also says that because the group distributed applications on the 11th and collected them on the 26th, it disproves the Democratic clerk’s claim that the applications languished for three weeks.
Mark Curley, postmaster for the Rock Island Post Office, corroborated Hughes’ timeline.
“There was no three weeks,” Curley said. “They didn’t languish.”
The Illinois Republican Party on Tuesday called on Chicago City Clerk and Illinois State Comptroller candidate Susana Mendoza to explain why she was sued by national electronics retailer Best Buy for unpaid personal bills after months of non-payment.
Cook County Sheriff’s Deputies served Mendoza with a summons to appear before a Cook County Judge to answer allegations that she opened a Best Buy credit account and ran up charges, but then failed to pay her bill. Mendoza later reached a settlement agreement with the retailer.
“It is concerning that anyone running for elected office would have to be sued to pay their bills,” said Nick Klitzing, Illinois Republican Party Executive Director. “But when that candidate is asking to serve as the state’s Chief Fiscal Officer, such an incident is disqualifying. If she can’t take care of her own finances, how can she be trusted to manage the state’s checkbook?”
Mendoza was personally served with papers requiring her to appear in Cook County Circuit Court on the morning of December 28, 2000. In the lawsuit, Best Buy maintained that Mendoza failed to make monthly payments as required in the credit agreement she signed. The retailer asked that Mendoza be required to pay a debt of $1,561.32.
“Susana Mendoza disqualified herself for this office by spending 10 years in Springfield voting at the behest of Mike Madigan for the very unbalanced budgets, tax increases and pension holidays that have landed our state in fiscal crisis, but this revelation is even more alarming,” Klitzing said. “Human services, small businesses, hospitals, schools and others depend on the Comptroller to swiftly process state payments – they simply can’t afford to take chances on someone that doesn’t even pay her own bills.”
Mendoza was 27 at the time of the purchase, and was elected to the Illinois General Assembly as a state representative in November 2000, at the age of 28. […]
Mendoza’s campaign dismissed the allegations, saying Mendoza bought a Best Buy laptop with an agreement that she’d have a year to make a payment, and no interest charges. After a year passed, she didn’t receive a bill. She was later sent a letter from a collection agency demanding the amount owed, plus a fee from the agency. Mendoza took Best Buy to court to prove that she did not receive a bill, and the case was settled with Mendoza paying what she owed for the laptop, her campaign said.
In a statement, Mendoza’s campaign manager Lauren Peters called the information release from the GOP a “desperate attempt to distract voters” from issues Munger wants to “run away from,” including her role in late payments for court-ordered disability payments during the budget impasse.
“The state of Illinois has never been worse off than it has been under the Rauner/Munger team,” Peters said. “And they will say or do anything to distract the voters of Illinois from the truth, including a decades old dispute, in order to avoid explaining how they managed to push the state further into debt while slashing social service.”
