Incumbent Kendall County Circuit Clerk led GOP primary by wide margin

Kendall County Circuit Clerk Matthew Prochaska is attributing his win Tuesday over Oswego Village Trustee Kit Kuhrt to the strides his office has made in making information more accessible to the public.

The Circuit Clerk is responsible for maintaining and preserving all the official records of the court filed in Kendall County. According to unofficial results, Prochaska received 4,222 votes, or 60.70% of the vote and Kuhrt received 2,734 votes, or 39.30% of the vote, in the Republican primary.

No one ran for the post in the Democratic primary.

“I think the voters focused on what we’ve done with the office the past four years,” said Prochaska, who has been Kendall County circuit clerk since December 2020. “My staff and I have made great technological strides in going towards E-Filing and E-Record. My staff and I have made great strides in increasing access to justice and trying to make things more user friendly for self-represented litigants. There’s still a long way to go in that process, but I really do think that the voters recognized the progress that was made at the Circuit Clerk’s Office.”

Prior to being elected to the post, Prochaska was on the Kendall County Board.

Prochaska expects he will have an opponent in the Nov. 5 general election.

“I always expect opposition in any election that I run,” he said. “If I do end up with an opponent, I will continue to comport myself the way I have in the past and run a good and clean issue-based election.”

Kuhrt thanked the voters who came out to support him in the race. He was elected to the Oswego Village Board in 2021.

During the election, Kuhrt, who is also a business owner, said he wanted to work to make the information in the Circuit Clerk’s Office public “as much as legally as permissible, instead of presuming all the information is private.”

“I know that it belongs to the taxpayers and it’s legally permissible for me to give it to you,” he said. “I’m not going to hide behind that FOIA law. Anything that’s legally permissible to put online can go online. Everything belongs to the people. The taxpayers are paying for it. It should all be on there.”