Incumbent Democratic Illinois Comptroller Susana A. Mendoza is projected to win the Illinois comptroller race, according to WGN News. 

WGN News called the race after Mendoza received 58.77% of the votes with 60% of votes reported. Mendoza was born in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood and moved to Bolingbrook as a child. After college, she moved back to Little Village and has been a Chicago resident since.

Mendoza is projected to win against Republican candidate Shannon Teresi and Libertarian candidate Deirdre McCloskey. Teresi has received 39.38% of reported votes while McCloskey has received 1.84%. 

Mendoza has previously served as State Representative from 2000 to 2011, and became the first female City Clerk of Chicago in February 2011. She served as the City Clerk for five years.

Mendoza was also the first Latina independently elected to statewide office in Illinois when she was elected Comptroller in a special election in 2016. She was re-elected to a full term in 2018.

Teresi has worked at the McHenry County Auditor’s Office for the last 12 years, after she was  appointed in 2018. McCloskey is a distinguished professor emerita of economics and history at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Mendoza had $2.5 million behind her campaign compared to Teresi, who had $130,000.

In her first year in office, Mendoza introduced and passed the Debt Transparency Act, which provides residents and legislators with a monthly accounting of the debts owed by every state agency. Former governor Bruce Rauner vetoed the legislation, but the House of Representatives unanimously overrode the veto. 

Mendoza passed three more transparency bills in her second year in office: the Truth-in-Hiring Act, the Truth in Budgeting Act, the Vendor Payment Program Transparency Act.

The Comptroller’s Office was created by the Constitutional Convention of 1970 as an expanded replacement for the Office of the Auditor of Public Accounts. The Comptroller is the state’s Chief Fiscal Control Officer and is responsible for the legal, efficient and effective operations of state government.

Mendoza was re-elected as comptroller in 2018 and won 59.9% of the vote against Republican candidate Darlene Senger.

This is a developing story, and will be updated as more information becomes available.

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