Representatives of police and firefighters — accompanied by those who have had family members die by suicide while working as a first responder — asked lawmakers for more assistance with mental health resources for their ranks on Wednesday, which was also World Mental Health Day.

Cook County Board President and mayoral candidate Toni Preckwinkle bristled when asked Wednesday if she had been the source who leaked a confidential Cook County inspector general report that found Democrat JB Pritzker had engaged in a “scheme to defraud” taxpayers when his Gold Coast mansion was reassessed sans toilets in 2015. Meanwhile, the Illinois Board of Higher Education on Wednesday reported Illinois lost another 2,301 college students this year, but claimed higher education enrollment in Illinois is stabilizing.

In the months before State Rep. Jeanne Ives (R-Wheaton) narrowly lost to Gov. Bruce Rauner in the March Republican primary, Ives and other Republicans took Rauner to task over a variety of alleged broken promises the governor had made on both social issues and the economy.

The mood was tense on Friday in a fifth-floor event room at Chicago’s Union League Club as news began to spread that the verdict would be read that afternoon in the trial of Jason Van Dyke, the police officer who shot and killed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014. The crowd even thinned a bit when attendees began receiving word that some of their friends and colleagues were being encouraged to leave work early, ahead of the 1:45 p.m. jury verdict.

Illinois’ tax revenues from wagering reached $1.36 billion last year, representing a modest 3.5 percent increase from FY 2017, according to a new report from the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability this week, as discussions continue on a major gaming expansion bill in Springfield.

State Sen. Sam McCann (C-Plainview), whose union support for his gubernatorial bid has rankled Gov. Bruce Rauner, collected over a quarter million more from union sources on Thursday, while Republicans and Democrats reported their own cash pulls as November 6 draws nearer.

Two topics jumped out from the malaise of argument in Wednesday evening’s ABC-7 gubernatorial debate: Gov. Bruce Rauner’s and JB Pritzker’s answers on campaign finance and revelations of sexual harassment in the Capitol.

Illinois is in the middle of the pack when it comes to both voter registration and voter turnout, but there’s growing evidence that vote by mail programs could boost both of those stats.

While approximately 8 percent of voters in Cook County voted by mail in 2016, that dynamic is reversed in Denver, 7 seven percent of voters cast their ballots in person and the rest of voters drop off their ballots at the mailbox or at secure repositories around the city.

That gives Colorado the fourth-highest voter turnout rate in the nation — and the highest  highest voter registration rate, said former Colorado-based election official Amber McReynolds, currently of the National Vote at Home Institute.

Speaking at an event Tuesday held by Reform for Illinois Tuesday, Reynolds said Colorado’s model is “very much about convenience.”

But beyond convenience and increased voter participation, Reynolds said pushing for a larger vote by mail system would actually make elections more secure.

“By spreading it out over a longer period of time and getting away from the Election Day sprint that we’re sort of used to in our politics and making it more of an election season, people have more options,” McReynolds said. “Administrators — we’re mitigating and separating risk as well. When you have everything intensely focused on one day, that’s a lot of risk.”

Illinois residents have long had the option of voting by mail, and have multiple routes in which to do so. The State Board of Elections, for example, requires voters to send an application for a mail-in ballot by Nov. 1. But campaigns have capitalized on the opportunity too.

Democrat JB Pritzker’s campaign, for example, has sent out two vote by mail applications to likely Democratic voters, which are addressed to the voters’ local election authority. Some campaigns also send out ballots with their candidate’s bubble already filled in, which only requires a voter’s signature. While these are legal, the some past iterations of these ballots have raised eyebrows, in both their presentation to voters and the return addresses to campaign headquarters, and not any official authority.

Noah Praetz of the Cook County Board of Elections told The Daily Line voting by mail requires a “shift in voter behavior.”

“From a cybersecurity standpoint, [voting by mail is] great,” Praetz said, noting that mailed applications are checked via phone calls to households and FBI-caliber signature verification.

“We’ve got a couple servers and some vote counting machines and they’re highly protected,” Praetz said. “Those we’ve got full control over. In local elections, vote by mail’s a place we watch really closely. We watch it closely in large elections too as well, but the incidence of bad behavior’s much less. We’d be watching this significantly in an odd year.”

Chicago voters are increasingly taking up the offer to vote by mail, said Jim Allen, a spokesman for the Chicago Board of Elections. Allen said that currently, the Chicago Board of Elections has received more than 65,000 applications to vote by mail.

“To put that in perspective, at this point in the 2016 presidential election, when we were on our way to a modern record, we had only 18,000,” Allen said. “We’ve already more than tripled that and we’re hoping to break our record from World War II of 116,000 when we had people deployed all over the planet.”

Allen is enthusiastic about the push for voting by mail, citing research that says voting by mail increases voter turnouts “at all age levels, especially among millennials.”

However, Allen warned that he and other election administrators shouldn’t make major shifts without considering vulnerable populations.

“The key concern we would have in terms of a largely vote by mail…program would be addressing homeless voters,” Allen said. “We’d have to make sure they’re able to receive and have an education program that’s effective and reaching out to the homeless community so they have a place that they can receive the ballot by mail, and/or some kind of alternative.”

One vulnerable population that may benefit from an increased push to vote by mail is people with disabilities.

Cheryl Jansen with Chicago-based Equip for Equality said voting is a “constant issue” for those with disabilities for many reasons, including a lack of affordable and accessible transportation.

“Although there are federal laws and state laws that are designed to protect and make sure that people with disabilities indeed have full and equal access to the electoral process, they continue to face barriers,” Jansen said.

Voting by mail is the only method available for inmates in Illinois’ county jails outside of Cook County.

Gov. Bruce Rauner in August amendatory vetoed HB 4469, which would have required voting materials be distributed to those in custody of county jails, though he left alone the part that stipulated counties with a population of more than 3 million people — which is to say, Cook County — should set up a temporary branch polling place. Other counties’ jails will be required to facilitate mail-in voting.”

There is a small but vocal group that is opposed to expanding vote by mail access without extended study of possible voter disenfranchisement.

Lora Chamberlain, president of Clean Count Cook County, told The Daily Line she worries about politically motivated poll workers manipulating vote by mail applications.

“Vote by mail itself if you you incorporate the U.S. [Postal Service] into the whole system opens up a complete new avenue for fraud and disenfranchisement,” she said.

Chamberlain said that her wariness of vote by mail systems began in 2006, when she claimed she witnessed a Republican election judge in Oregon refusing to receive a delivery of mailed ballots after 7 p.m. even though the truck had broken down.

Chamberlain also expressed disappointment over a bill that passed the legislature this spring and that Rauner signed in July. Chamberlain said language requiring risk-limiting audits related to voting by mail, and a clause that would have required campaign-sponsored ballots to only have return addresses to local election authorities were taken out — a move she blamed on House Speaker Mike Madigan (D-Chicago).

Nearly 17 months ago, former Illinois Republican Party Chairman Pat Brady stood outside of Democratic candidate for governor JB Pritzker’s Gold Coast home, surrounded by blown-up pictures of the luxurious interior of Pritzker’s “uninhabitable” second mansion next door, which looked anything but unlivable.

Six political action committees set up this summer in the name of Asian Americans to support GOP candidates are betting big on a candidate challenging a Democratic stalwart. Meanwhile, Democratic money kept on flowing on Monday after a big-bucks weekend.