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Pope Leo XIV has done something no pope before him has ever done: he has cast a vote in an American election. The Vatican confirmed on Friday that the Chicago-born pope has submitted a mail-in ballot for the November 3 midterm elections, making him the first sitting pope known to have voted in a United States election — and, historians say, very likely the first pope ever to vote in a democratic election anywhere.
The ballot belongs to Will County, Illinois. Leo remains a registered voter there under his birth name, Robert Francis Prevost, at an address in New Lenox, the Chicago suburb where his elder brother John lives. The Will County clerk’s office confirmed that the pope requested a vote-by-mail ballot on October 3, a month ahead of Election Day. Like other American citizens living abroad, he is entitled to vote where he is registered — and his ballot is going back to Illinois from the Vatican.
The Holy See Press Office set out the thinking behind it. Leo, it said, “has exercised his right to vote as a United States citizen” and has done so “whenever he was eligible to do so,” including during the more than twenty years he lived in Peru as a missionary priest and bishop, when he voted there as a Peruvian citizen as well. “The Holy Father expresses his belief in the right and the duty of citizens to participate in democratic processes,” the statement added.
It is a habit, not a gesture. Voting records held by the Illinois State Board of Elections show that Robert Prevost has been voting for decades: Democratic primary ballots in 2008 and 2010, while he was registered in Cook County, then Republican primary ballots in 2012, 2014 and 2016 after his registration moved to suburban Will County — voters in Illinois do not register by party and pick a primary ballot election by election. In general elections he voted in 2012, 2014, 2018 and, most recently, 2024, when he cast an absentee ballot in the presidential election months before his own election as pope. He did not vote in Illinois’ March primary this year.
The first itself rests on a simple fact: Leo is the first American pope. Born in Chicago in 1955 and elected in May 2025, he kept the United States citizenship he was born with alongside the Peruvian citizenship he took during his years there. He is also the sovereign of Vatican City, an absolute monarchy that holds no elections — which makes his ballot, cast from the Apostolic Palace, a first of two kinds. “I don’t think popes have ever voted in a democratic election before,” the papal historian Michael Walsh said as the news broke.
What he is voting on is ordinary Illinois business: an open United States Senate seat left by the retiring Dick Durbin, Governor JB Pritzker’s bid for a third term, his own congressman’s re-election race, and county and judicial posts. How the completed ballot travelled back has not been explained — the clerk’s office said on Thursday that it had not yet received it, and the pope’s brother John was in Rome this week. What is on the record is the request, made on October 3, ten days before Leo underwent surgery to remove a cancerous tumour from his right lung; he left hospital on October 17 and has been gradually resuming his work.
The vote also lands in the middle of a watched relationship. Leo has clashed with the Trump administration over the war in Iran and the treatment of immigrants, and earlier this year President Trump called him “weak” and captive to the “radical left.” Leo answered in April: “I’m not afraid of the Trump administration or of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel.” The public dispute has since subsided. His ballot says nothing about any of that — the records do not show how he voted. But the first American pope has now done, from the Vatican, what he urges ordinary citizens everywhere to do: take part.
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