Pope Leo XIV requested a mail-in ballot from Vatican City to vote in Illinois' midterms next week, and the same establishment press that spent years telling ordinary Americans their election-integrity concerns were illegitimate can't stop gushing about it.
The stakes are straightforward: if the machinery of American elections is important enough to celebrate when a global religious leader uses it from another continent, it's important enough to scrutinize when millions of everyday citizens use it here at home.
Here are the facts. Robert Francis Prevost — now Pope Leo XIV — is still a registered voter in Will County, Illinois. He requested a mail-in ballot on October 3, according to Kim Fladhammer, chief of staff for the Will County Clerk's Office. The clerk's office has not yet received a completed ballot back from the Vatican, and time is running out to get it postmarked for the November 3 election. The pope recently underwent lung cancer surgery, which may complicate the timeline.
The Vatican press office confirmed the vote Friday, saying Leo "has exercised his right to vote as a United States citizen, whenever he was eligible to do so" and "expresses his belief in the right and the duty of citizens to participate in democratic processes."
NBC News framed the story as a historic first — the first American pope, and therefore the first pope to vote in a U.S. election. Breitbart noted the same facts but pointed out the mechanics that NBC glossed over: Illinois eliminated excuse-based absentee voting in 2010, meaning anyone can vote by mail for any reason. Matt Dietrich, spokesman for the Illinois State Board of Elections, told the Chicago Sun-Times that the pope's ballot falls under UOCAVA — the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act — a law designed primarily for military serving abroad but available to any U.S. citizen overseas.
The pope's voting record shows he has cast ballots in general elections in 2012, 2014, 2018, and 2024. He also voted in Republican primaries in 2012, 2014, and 2016, and in Democratic primaries in 2008 and 2010. Illinois allows voters to choose either party's primary each cycle without registering by party.
NBC made sure to note that Leo has been "an outspoken critic" of Trump policies on Iran and immigration, and that Trump has called him "WEAK on crime" and "terrible for Foreign Policy." The network also highlighted Vice President JD Vance's criticism of the pope on theology and foreign policy. None of that is irrelevant: the pope's ballot this year includes races for Gov. JB Pritzker, Senate candidate Juliana Stratton, and Rep. Jonathan Jackson — all Democrats in solidly blue districts.
What NBC and the rest of the celebration coverage won't ask is the obvious question: if a citizen living in a foreign city-state, surrounded by armed security and diplomatic immunity, can have his ballot mailed across an ocean and counted without anyone raising an eyebrow, why is it considered beyond the pale to ask that a voter in Chicago, Philadelphia, or Atlanta show a photo ID?
The answer isn't complicated. The same people who cheer the pope's overseas ballot are the people who benefit from the loosest possible rules for everyone else. Illinois dropped its excuse requirement for absentee voting in 2010. Since then, mail-in voting has expanded every cycle, and so have questions about chain of custody, signature verification, and ballot harvesting. Those questions aren't conspiracy theories — they're the natural consequence of removing safeguards that once gave Americans confidence in the count.
The pope is a U.S. citizen and has every legal right to vote. Nobody is disputing that. But the press corps that treats his Vatican-to-Joliet ballot as a heartwarming civic moment is the same press corps that spent 2020 and 2022 insisting that any concern about mail-in voting was an attack on democracy itself. The contrast isn't subtle.
