The seat is up for grabs this year. But, what does the job entail? With Election Day quickly approaching, WMBD News is getting a series of civics lessons from Dr. Megan Remmel, Political Science Professor at Bradley University.
This year’s Peoria County Clerk race features a third party candidate.
Libertarian Ann Agama takes on incumbent Democrat Rachael Parker.
Remmel explained why lower level offices, such as a county clerk, are partisan, when many of them do not offer many, if any, opportunities to carry out duties in a partisan manner.
“It’s out of this movement out of the late 1800s-early 1900s, where we were living the Gilded Age, where things were kind of Gilded and golden on the outside, but sort of rusted and rotted on the inside with corruption,” she said.
“So the idea was to break a lot of these public offices up into being elected rather than appointed so they were responsible to the people and they couldn’t be used for patronage [and] couldn’t be used to just appoint somebody who had done a favor for some other elected official, and so it was to keep these positions accountable to the population.
“At the time, party machines were really, really strong in the United States, and so there wasn’t going to be an elected position that didn’t have a partisan component to it. So the fact we’ve got these elected positions that are also partisan is sort of a relic of events from 120-plus years ago.”
As for a county clerk’s responsibilities, Remmel described it as “a jack-of-all-trades.
“One of the things I think most of us are familiar with, for a county clerk, they are in charge of running elections,” she said.
“They’re in charge of registration, opening polling places, and in charge of administering all our elections. All the mail-in ballots you’ve been doing, all the early voting you’ve been doing, this election cycle has been kind of organized through the county clerk’s office.”
Additionally, the county clerk is in charge of tax records, vital records and, as Remmel put it, the “keeper of the records for a county,” meaning anything enacted through a county government, notary public applications, liquor licenses, and business applications all go through that office.
