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Before you read on, take the pledge to be a Pope Leo voter on Nov. 3, and see where your candidates stand in our Catholic voter guides.
Pope Leo XIV has requested a mail ballot to vote in next Tuesday’s midterm elections.
I confirmed the request this evening with the Will County Clerk’s office in suburban Chicago, where the pope remains registered under his birth name, Robert Francis Prevost. He made the request on Oct. 3, a month before Election Day.
Independent reporting from the Chicago Sun-Times, published this evening, matches my own.
WJOL in Joliet first reported the request on Oct. 23, citing sources who said someone close to the pope had asked for the ballot to be sent to his registered address in New Lenox.
That address belongs to his brother John, who was in Rome this week. On Wednesday, John Prevost joined about 50 parishioners from St. Jude Catholic Church in New Lenox who met Leo in St. Peter’s Square at the end of a pilgrimage in the footsteps of St. Augustine, Vatican News reported.
It is plausible that John carried the ballot to his brother and is now bringing it home to Will County, though neither the Vatican nor the family has said so.
It is not immediately known whether Leo has returned his ballot to the county. Once he does, Leo will become the first pope in the two-thousand-year history of the Catholic Church to vote in a secular election. No pontiff before him has cast a ballot in any nation’s civil elections, and his will be counted in the United States.
Days after the conclave in May 2025, Matt Dietrich of the Illinois State Board of Elections told Religion News Service that the new pope was still an active Will County voter and had mailed in a ballot for the November 2024 presidential race.
Federal law protecting Americans who live overseas, Dietrich added, would likely preserve his right to vote in federal races even if his Illinois residency changed.
Will County’s records show a voter who has crossed party lines. Prevost took Democratic ballots in the 2008 and 2010 primaries, then Republican ballots in 2012, 2014 and 2016, and he cast general-election ballots in 2012, 2014, 2018 and 2024. Because Illinois has no party registration, any voter can choose either party’s primary ballot. I confirmed this spring that he skipped the state’s March primary.
I confirmed this spring that he did not vote in Illinois’ March primary. In Illinois, voters do not have to register by party and can choose parties for their primary ballot.
His part in Illinois politics has gone beyond casting ballots. On March 9, 2011, the day Gov. Pat Quinn signed the law abolishing the state’s death penalty, Prevost (then the prior general of the Augustinians, living in Rome) typed a note into the comment form on the governor’s website.
“Dear Governor Quinn, THANK YOU for your courageous decision in signing into law the elimination of the death penalty,” he wrote. “You have my full support!”
WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times uncovered the note through a records request in June 2025. Quinn had never seen it; he now keeps it framed.
As pope, Leo has come back to that law. On April 24, the same day the Trump Justice Department cleared the way for firing squads in federal executions, he sent a video message to DePaul University marking 15 years since Illinois ended capital punishment.
“We affirm that the dignity of the person is not lost even after very serious crimes are committed,” he said, joining the crowd “in celebrating the decision made by the governor of Illinois in 2011.”
He has drawn the line just as sharply in the debate over life. “Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion,’ but says, ‘I’m in favor of the death penalty,’ is not really pro-life,” Leo told reporters at Castel Gandolfo on Sept. 30, 2025, when asked about Cardinal Blase Cupich’s plan to honor Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin.
Illinois will keep his choices as secret as anyone else’s in New Lenox. What he cares about is no mystery, though: for nearly 18 months he has argued about it, in public, with Donald Trump, JD Vance and their allies.
Here is the ballot the Will County Clerk mailed him, from the county’s sample ballot for his New Lenox precinct.
The back carries a county board race, two judicial contests and four judicial retention votes.
War sits near the top. Leo pleaded with Trump to choose dialogue over force in Venezuela and then in Cuba. On Oct. 27, still recovering from lung surgery, he sent a video to the 40th anniversary of John Paul II’s 1986 Assisi summit and answered the Iran war directly: “There is no such thing as a holy war.” JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson had tried to dress that war in the language of just war theory.
Immigration has been the bitterest of these fights. This summer, Vance told Laura Ingraham that the Holy See’s views on immigration were “troubling,” two days after ICE detained a nun walking to Mass in Texas. Bishops, priests and nuns across MAGA country have since followed Leo in defending migrants.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Trump ally, defied Leo and Tennessee’s bishops this fall and sent Christa Pike to a botched execution. And while Trump signed an order last December aimed at overriding state limits on artificial intelligence, Leo devoted an encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, to defending human dignity in the age of AI.
Now that the pope is voting, you need to vote, too. Follow his lead, and sign our pledge.
Leo has said Catholics cannot be “unengaged spectators,” and this morning I asked every reader of Letters from Leo to take the Pope Leo XIV Voter Pledge, a promise to vote on Nov. 3 with a conscience formed by the Gospel and the teaching of the Church.
I’m asking again tonight. If you’ve already signed, send the pledge to one Catholic in your life who hasn’t made a plan to vote, along with our state-by-state voter guide.
The pope filed his request from Rome a month ago. You have five days, and for most of you the trip to the polls is a good deal shorter.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
@God you must be so proud!
This pope is such an effective leader.