Pope Leo’s Vatican ballot tests U.S. citizenship limits

The Vatican press office said Friday that Pope Leo XIV has submitted a mail-in ballot in Chicago for the Nov. 3 midterm elections. He is the first pope known to vote in a United States election.

“Pope Leo XIV has exercised his right to vote as a United States citizen, whenever he was eligible to do so,” the Holy See stated on Oct. 30, 2026. “The Holy Father expresses his belief in the right and the duty of citizens to participate in democratic processes.” In keeping with that practice, the statement said, “he has submitted his mail-in ballot in Chicago.” It added that during his years in Peru he voted whenever he was eligible.

Born Robert Francis Prevost, Leo remains a U.S. citizen registered at the New Lenox address of his brother, John Prevost. On Oct. 3 he requested a vote-by-mail ballot through the Will County clerk’s office. Kim Fladhammer, the office’s chief of staff, told the Chicago Sun-Times that “Robert Francis Prevost is on the list of individuals who requested a vote by mail ballot for the upcoming election.” The Sun-Times first reported the request. When NBC News checked later, the clerk’s office said it had not yet received a completed ballot. The envelope’s path runs from Vatican City to Joliet. Leo had undergone lung cancer surgery earlier in October.

Illinois keeps no party registration; voters pick a party ballot only in primaries. Records show Prevost cast ballots in general elections from 2000 through 2024 except 2020 and 2022. He took Republican primary ballots in 2012, 2014 and 2016, and Democratic primary ballots in 2008 and 2010. He did not vote in Illinois’s March 2026 primary. The records do not show which candidates he chose.

The Nov. 3 contests will decide all 435 House seats and 35 Senate seats nationwide, plus governorships in 36 states. In Illinois the ballot includes Gov. JB Pritzker’s bid for a third term, the open U.S. Senate seat vacated by Dick Durbin with Juliana Stratton as the Democratic nominee, and the re-election race of Rep. Jonathan Jackson. After the Sun-Times story, Pritzker posted on social media: “If the Pope can vote all the way from Vatican City, you can too!”

The legal route is the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, known as UOCAVA. It lets eligible U.S. citizens living abroad cast absentee ballots in federal elections, and Illinois extends mail voting to registered voters more broadly. Leo’s registration at his brother’s Will County address keeps him inside that system even while he resides in Vatican City as head of the Holy See.

The Vatican’s argument is straightforward and should be stated in its own terms: citizenship carries both a right and a duty to take part in democratic processes, and Leo has done so whenever eligible, including from Peru and now from Rome. That claim tracks the statute. UOCAVA was written for service members and civilians posted overseas who remain part of the American political community and expect to return to it.

A pope is not a private expatriate. He is the sovereign of a foreign state and the pastor of a global church. The American constitutional order rests on a people who share one political fate and who hold their government to account through elections. When the same person who heads another sovereign entity marks an Illinois ballot that helps choose a governor, a senator and the balance of the House, the act is no longer only personal civic habit. It places the electoral power of an American citizen in the hands of an official whose daily duties run to a different government and a different jurisdiction. Dual status is lawful under current statute. Whether it fits the design of self-government is a harder question the statute never answered.

That system is lawful. Whether it is wise is the point now in front of voters and legislators. Overseas balloting protects the franchise of citizens who serve or work abroad and still live under U.S. law’s ultimate claim. It was not drafted for a head of state whose temporal sovereignty sits outside the United States and whose public interventions already reach American foreign policy and immigration enforcement. Leo and President Donald Trump conducted a public back-and-forth in April over the Iran war that began with strikes on Feb. 28, 2026, and over immigration policy. Those clashes do not strip Leo of his passport. They do illustrate the collision: the same voice that addresses Washington as a foreign moral authority also retains a mail-in line into Illinois results.