Lake County Clerk held a coin flip on Monday to decide one of the winners in the race for Shields Township trustee after two candidates received the exact same number of votes.

The Lake County Clerk held a coin flip on Monday to decide one of the winners in the race for Shields Township trustee after two candidates received the exact same number of votes.

A Lake County judge on Monday morning dismissed a lawsuit seeking to halt the certification of the election results for Shields Township trustee.

The lawsuit, filed by Michelle Parnell, one of the candidates for trustee, alleged that there were errors in the election process that could have affected the outcome of the race. Parnell lost the election by 40 votes.

Judge Charles R. Smith Jr. said he was dismissing the lawsuit because Parnell had not shown that there was a “clear legal right” to the relief she was seeking.

The lawsuit focused on two main issues:

* A small number of ballots were rejected by election officials because they did not include a vote for trustee, even though the voters had made choices for other races on the ballot. According to state law, such ballots should have been counted for all of the races in which a vote was made, but not for trustee.

* A voter registration application was rejected by a precinct judge because it did not include the applicant’s full legal name. According to a 1986 state law, the application should have been accepted despite the missing name.

Smith said he did not believe that either of these errors would have affected the outcome of the election. He noted that only a few ballots were rejected for the lack of a trustee vote, and that the voter registration application was for a precinct where all of the candidates received a nearly equal number of votes.

“It does not appear that any of the errors identified by the plaintiff would have changed the outcome of the election for any candidate,” Smith wrote in his order.

The judge also said that he was dismissing the lawsuit because it was filed too late. The last day to file a contest to an election is 30 days after the election, but the lawsuit was not filed until May 1, which was more than 30 days after the April 1 election.

Smith said that while the time limit for filing a contest is generally short, it is “not necessarily fatal” if the applicant can show that they were unable to file the lawsuit earlier due to “fraud or other sufficient cause.” However, in this case, Parnell did not show that she was unable to file the lawsuit earlier.

“The errors identified by the plaintiff were readily apparent and could have been discovered with due diligence earlier in the time period for filing a contest,” Smith wrote in his order.

Parnell’s lawsuit was the subject of a hearing Monday morning in the 12th Judicial Circuit Court in Lake County.

Attorneys for the county and for the other candidates in the election argued that the lawsuit should be dismissed. They said that Parnell had not shown that any of the errors identified in the lawsuit were material or would have affected the outcome of the election.

Parnell’s attorney, Robert J. Lustig, said that his client was seeking to have the election set aside and for the court to order a new election. Lustig argued that the errors by election officials showed a “failure to follow the law” and that the errors were "serious enough to warrant setting aside the election."

The errors by election officials in rejecting the voter registration application and in failing to count ballots for races where a vote was made could add up to 40 votes, which would be enough to change the outcome of the election, Lustig said.

Parnell's lawsuit also focused on a statement by Anthony Vega, the Lake County Clerk, in which Vega said that the county's new vote centers, which were implemented for the first time in the April 2024 election, were a success.

"The new vote centers gave voters the freedom to cast their ballot at any site throughout the county on Election Day," Vega said in a press release last week. "Over 15% of Election Day voters took advantage of this option to vote at a center other than their assigned precinct."

Parnell's lawsuit stated that the press release by Vega was "false and misleading" because it failed to disclose that "a substantial number of voters were unable to vote at the assigned precinct due to administrative errors by the defendant county election officials."

The errors by the county's election officials in rejecting ballots and voter registration applications were "not isolated errors, but rather a pattern of conduct by the defendant county election officials to disregard the law in order to achieve a desired outcome," the lawsuit stated.

After the hearing, Lustig said that he and his client were "disappointed" by the judge's ruling.

"We believe that the errors by the county's election officials were serious and that they could have affected the outcome of the election," Lustig said.

"We are considering our options for appeal."

The lawsuit was filed in the wake of the close race for Shields Township trustee.

The candidates for the four trustee positions were Michelle Parnell, who received 964 votes; Trent Andrew Swarthout, who received 932 votes; Christopher Papas, who received 923 votes; and Christopher S