Appeals court: DuPage Board can question county clerk’s elections spending
(Legal Newsline) — DuPage County’s clerk can’t demand the county government pay invoices without oversight or demonstrating her office abided by county bidding rules or other accounting standards, a state appeals panel has ruled.
County Clerk Jean Kaczmarek, however, said she will ask the Illinois Supreme Court to decide what she believes to be a constitutional misunderstanding by the appeals court and the county over a county board’s authority to manage the finances of a countywide office holder.
On Oct. 23, a three-justice panel of the Illinois Third District Appellate Court sided with DuPage County in the dispute with the county’s outgoing clerk.
The court fight dates back to 2024, when DuPage County State’s Attorney Robert Berlin sued Kaczmarek’s office, seeking court orders directing the county clerk to submit to DuPage County accounting practices and other financial rules when submitting outstanding invoices to the county board for payment.
The dispute particularly centered on invoices worth hundreds of thousands of dollars that Kaczmarek asserted the county should pay to contractors she had hired to before elections-related work.
The county clerk oversees election administration, including ballot printing and vote counting, in DuPage County.
Services rendered by the contractors included vote machine testing, logistics and management.
The county board, however, refused to pay the bills, saying Kaczmarek’s office allegedly had failed to follow “county accounting principles,” including failing to provide “essential financial documentation, including contracts…” among other alleged shortcomings.
According to court documents, the county board demanded the clerk identify how the county should account for the payments within the clerk’s budget of allocated funds.
However, Kaczmarek asserted the county’s demands and refusal to pay amount to unconstitutional trespass on her authority. As long as the invoices are to be paid from money allocated to her, the county board’s financial transparency and oversight demands are unconstitutional micromanaging of her office’s business, she argued.
Kaczmarek, however, has lost that argument in DuPage County Circuit Court and, now, on appeal.
Justice Joseph P. Hettel authored the unanimous ruling. He was joined by Justices Lance R. Peterson and Matthew G. Bertani.
In the ruling, the justices said they found Kaczmarek’s arguments “not well-founded.”
They said the county’s demands line up with the requirements of laws requiring financial itemization in budgeting, spelling out how each office or agency is spending the money allotted to it under the overall county budget.
To find otherwise, the justices said, would limit governmental transparency, make it harder for taxpayers to know how the public funds are being spent, and potentially allow government officials to spend money on projects or programs that differ from what was promised, outside of the public eye.
They particularly rejected Kaczamarek’s arguments that the law should be read to require the county board to hand over three lump sums to her office every year, for “personnel” “commodities” and to fund “contractual” arrangements. In support, Kaczmarek pointed to language in the law governing county governments, which gives county clerks the authority to “control the internal operations of the clerk’s office and to procure necessary equipment, materials and services to perform the duties of the clerk’s office.”
But the justices said Kaczmarek’s “argument fails to recognize the difference between procurement and appropriation.”
“Quite simply, the plain language of (that provision) does not mandate that the county board appropriate funds for a county clerk’s office in categories of ‘equipment, materials and services,'” Hettel wrote. “Moreover, … itemization is not just an important part of the budgetary and appropriations processes for county boards, it is mandated by statute. While a county board may, out of convenience, use ‘equipment, materials and services’ as some of the itemization categories, it is not required to do so.”
Kaczmarek has served as county clerk since 2018. She is not seeking another term in office. Her current term will expire Nov. 30.
In her years in office, Kaczmarek has often found her decisions as clerk at the center of controversy.
In 2022, for instance, a DuPage County judge ruled Kaczmarek’s office had improperly counted mail-in ballots using a process the judge described as “an obvious way to commit ballot fraud.”
That ruling was also upheld on appeal.
However, just weeks later, in early 2023, Illinois Democratic lawmakers in Springfield changed state law to specifically allow county clerks to count ballots in that exact manner, nullifying the lawsuit against Kaczmarek.
In the years since, the clerk has clashed with other officials in Illinois’ second most populous county. particularly over her office’s budget and financial transparency. In the fall of 2025, the DuPage County Board voted to censure Kaczmarek for her alleged mismanagement of the clerk’s office’s finances.
At that time, County Board Chair Deborah Conroy said the board voted to censure Kaczmarek “to protect the integrity of DuPage County.”
“Good governance is not optional,” Conroy said at the time. “It is the foundation of public trust.”
Following the appellate ruling, Conroy issued another statement, saying the DuPage County Board was “grateful” for the decision in their favor.
However, Conroy noted the court fight has cost taxpayers more than $300,000 in legal fees.
“We look forward to putting this matter behind us and working collaboratively with the next Clerk to ensure the office understands and follows the County’s financial procedures,” Conroy said. “… The sad truth is that all of this could have been avoided had Clerk Kaczmarek simply listened to the State’s Attorney and followed the law.”
Kaczmarek, however, signalled the court fight isn’t over yet. In a statement following the ruling, the clerk blasted the decision, and pledged to appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court.
In her statement, she indicated she believed the decision will threaten the ability of county clerk’s to independently administer elections in Illinois.
“Every Illinois Attorney General for over 40 years has held that county boards do not have the power to interfere with independently elected county officers such as clerks and sheriffs by exercising control over how much money they can spend in specific narrow line-item categories,” Kaczmarek said in the statement. “If the county board can micromanage how much money the county clerk can spend in specific categories, then then the county board, and not the county clerk, has final control over the administration of elections.
“The Appellate Court’s ruling fails to engage forthrightly with the core dispute at the heart of the case, which is where the limit lies between the county board’s authority to appropriate funds and the county clerk’s authority to determine how those funds are spent,” she added. “Every county clerk, sheriff, and treasurer in the state of Illinois should be concerned that what has happened in DuPage County puts their offices at risk for micromanagement and interference from their county boards.”
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