Too good to be entirely true: Cook County Jail detainees did not support Trump (or the retention judges) as much as we thought...

The news that President-Elect Donald Trump got a plurality of the votes cast in the precinct wherein the Cook County Jail is located got a lot of traction. FWIW jumped on the bandwagon, too, running a piece about that and then (staying on brand) looking at the judicial retention results reported in that precinct.

That's a map of the 19th precinct of the 24th Ward at the top of this piece. And it does indeed contain the Cook County Jail. But the boundaries are not coextensive.

My second look at this story was prompted by a question left in the comment queue. Last Friday night a sharp-eyed reader asked, "Hmm. Don't jail detainees vote absentee out of their home ward/suburb, therefore their totals would be included in those totals and not the 19th precinct of the 24th Ward???"

I didn't publish the comment until today, as I was preparing this article.

I didn't publish the comment because I didn't know the answer. I knew detainees voted from the jail. I knew Injustice Watch made a point of distributing its voter guide at the jail.

But that didn't answer the question. Sophia Ansari, Director of Public Relations and Communications for the Cook County Sheriff, explained that the FWIW reader had the gist of it: Ansari wrote FWIW that "individuals in custody vote based on their home addresses. One thing to clarify is that individuals in custody who are registered to vote in Cook County are voting in person, as the jail is an early voting polling place." So those votes would not have been counted in the 19th Precinct of the 24th Ward.

Moreover, Max Bever, the Director of Communications for the Chicago Board of Elections, confirmed that the Election Day polling place for the 19th Precinct of the 24th Ward is at Spry School, located on South Marshall Blvd. -- not in the jail. Jail detainees would not have been voting at the school.

But it is not entirely fake news: Bever told FWIW in an email, "1,479 Chicago voters [cast] a ballot from Cook County Jail for the November 5, 2024 General Election." The jail was an early voting site, and, according to Bever, there were "two weekends of Early Voting for Pre-Trial Detainees, held on Saturday, October 19; Sunday, October 20; Saturday, October 26; and Sunday, October 27." But 416 of the detainees "used Same Day Registration," Bever said, "which often indicates they used the jail as their address to vote." Therefore, Bever concluded, "it would be more accurate to say that some Pre-Trial Detainees’ ballots would be cast within the 19th Precinct of the 24th Ward, while other voters were previously registered elsewhere, or could provide proof of ID for an address outside the precinct for registration."

So the story is still that Trump carried the precinct in which Cook County Jail is located... but most of the votes counted there were not cast by detainees.... The story is not quite as intriguing as it may have first seemed.

Hat Tip to the Anonymous FWIW reader (why are they always anonymous?) who gently nudged me down the path of enlightenment.