Niles Township High School Election Interference

Part 1 of a 2 part series on 2023 Municipal and Board Election Shenanigans

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Let me be clear that I hate the term election interference. I think it’s a weasel word that comes with all sorts of garbage baked in. Just using the phrase makes my eyes roll in the back of my head, but it’s also the term used in Illinois Law, so I’m going to use it for now.

Most School Districts in Illinois hold their elections in off-years. Evanston, New Trier, and Skokie all had School Board elections on April 4, 2023. This story is about District 219, which consists of Niles North High School and Niles West High School.

According to data obtained via public records request, Niles HS District employees used public email servers and equipment to promote an event on March 1, 2023. This event was a “meet the candidate” event that featured five “equity candidates”, out of the nine candidates running for the D219 School Board.

You can view the email server logs obtained by FOIA request. According to records, they promoted this event to 592 emails that met the D219 Liasons: Liason-Affinity filter. It’s not clear to me what that filter was, or who was specifically targeted in these emails, since the recipient email addresses were redacted. I do think it is safe to say these were not District employees, because they would not be redacting those email addresses.

This is pretty clearly not allowed in Illinois Law (10 ILCS 5/9-25.1). I called the Illinois State Board of Elections who confirmed this is the proper statute.

(b) No public funds shall be used to urge any elector to vote for or against any candidate or proposition, or be appropriated for political or campaign purposes to any candidate or political organization. This Section shall not prohibit the use of public funds for dissemination of factual information relative to any proposition appearing on an election ballot, or for dissemination of information and arguments published and distributed under law in connection with a proposition to amend the Constitution of the State of Illinois.

(c) The first time any person violates any provision of this Section, that person shall be guilty of a Class B misdemeanor. Upon the second or any subsequent violation of any provision of this Section, the person violating any provision of this Section shall be guilty of a Class A misdemeanor.

My reading of the law is that an event like this is permissible if it was something like, “Equity Forum” and all the candidates were invited. However, I spoke with one candidate who confirms that they were, in fact, not invited to this event.

I reached out to the District on April 3rd with questions and received the following non-answer to my questions.

Emails were received. If the information you are seeking is not found in the documents provided or on the district website, you may submit a FOIA Request Form. Please note that some records and documents are not considered open to the public and are not subject to release via the FOIA process. 

The next question: did it tip the election? Well, it’s hard to say. For one, I have no idea how many people attended this event. Second, the election results were all over the place and promotion in this event didn’t guarantee a win. For instance, McAlpin-Toney, who is the Director of Equity at ETHS and was featured in this event finished in last place.

The Illinois State Board of Elections also confirmed that they do not handle things like this, it is handled by the State Prosecutor’s Office. I reached out to board members and the state to try to find out if there was any litigation regarding this, and to my knowledge there hasn’t been any. Should there be? Leave a comment and let me know.