The Illinois Attorney General is in fact elected by the people of the state of Illinois. The United States Attorney General is appointed by and serves at the pleasure of the president.
“There’s a whole lot of difference there in terms of what the responsibilities are,” said Illinois Attorney General candidate David Shestokas.
Shestokas served as a Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney for Cook County and is currently a Chicago Bd. Of Elections Hearing Officer and a Will County Arbitrator.
In 1990 he was the Republican Nominee for United States Congress in IL 5 th Congressional District. He served from 1995 to 2004 as Lemont Public Library Trustee. In 2016, in Broward County FL working with the Trump/Rubio campaign he discovered 150,000 ballots that had been opened illegally in secret,
behind locked doors.
He represents the plaintiff in the current case, Illinois Conservative Union vs Illinois State Board of Elections.
So what’s this current case about?
Shestokas said in 26 counties out of 102 in Illinois there’s more people registered to vote than there are people who live there of voting age. There’s a provision in the Voting Registration Act that provides citizen enforcement against the election authority. The Illinois Conservative Union board members, back in 2019, went down to Springfield and asked for the records that they’re entitled to under the National Voting Registration Act.
Shestokas said the Illinois State Board of Elections said ‘no you can’t have them.’.
“You have to file a violation, they make you jump through some hoops. After it’s all said and done you have the way to sue the board of elections, which we did last year back in 2020 before the election. The Board of Elections continued to say no and took in to motions to dismiss,” said Shestokas.
Shestokas said they would have a motion to dismiss on one subject. A motion to desist on what they called ‘state sovereignty’ and another on the 11th amendment.
“The truth is this issue on whether citizens are entitled to this information to check if our voting roles are accurate,” said Shestokas. “Various states have done what Illinois has done, 12 out of 12 have lost every situation. As I was looking through this I said , ‘holy cow you know who the lawyer is of the Illinois State Board of Elections, I could guess… It’s the Illinois Attorney General who’s making these folks from the Illinois Conservative Union jump through hoops.’ Essentially to vindicate the rights they have under the law.”
Is the attorney general supposed to act as a check on the Governor?
The Illinois Emergency Management Act gives the Governor a window of declaring a disaster of 30 days within which he is supposed to go through the legislature.
“There’s been a long time, long standing opinion in the Attorney General’s office that says, ‘at 30 days you have to go to the legislature’s office and it’s over.’ Current AG Kwame Raoul, despite that long-standing opinion, simply rewrote the law and said, ‘oh no he can do that in serial declarations of 30 days.’ It’s Raoul that is the enabling agent for so much of the abuse that we wind up getting. The Attorney General, as you mentioned, is an independently elected constitutional officer. Who owes his duty, or her duty, to the people of the state of Illinois not to the governor of the state of Illinois, not to the Board of Elections, not the Department of Public Health. The authority, not only the authority, but the responsibility of the AG’s office goes well beyond consumer protection that’s so popular, because it gets in the headlines,” said Shestokas.
There is currently no one challenging Shestokas. Shestokas said Cook County is his home.
“There’s one of those things that I think needs to be done from time to time is too many Republicans never get somebody from Cook County,” said Shestokas.
Shestokas learned his Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Bradley University and his Juris Doctor from the John Marshall Law School with honors having served on Law Review. He is licensed to practice law in Illinois and Florida.
