A pope has voted in an American election for the first time

It is a small act with a long shadow. Pope Leo XIV has submitted a mail in ballot in Chicago for the November 3 midterm elections, the Vatican confirmed on Friday, making him the first pope ever to vote in a US general election. There has never been an American pope before Leo, so no pope has had the chance, but the Vatican did not present it as a novelty. Its statement said he 'has exercised his right to vote as a United States citizen' whenever he was eligible, and that he did the same during his years living in Peru whenever he was eligible there.

The mechanics are ordinary, which is rather the point. Leo, born Robert Prevost, is registered at a New Lenox address in Will County, Illinois, and requested his mail ballot on October 3, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, which first reported the vote and quoted the Will County clerk's office. That was days before he underwent surgery to remove a tumour from his lung, the operation the Vatican confirmed earlier this month. Even his route back to work, it turns out, included the county clerk.

His voting record, held by the Illinois State Board of Elections, is the detail that will frustrate anyone hoping to claim him. The Associated Press reports he submitted ballots in every general election since 2000 except 2020 and 2022, and voted in five primaries, requesting Democratic ballots twice and Republican ballots three times. Illinois primaries make a voter declare a party to take part. Across 25 years his declarations point in both directions, which reads less like partisanship than like a man who votes in the race in front of him.

His ballot this year carries real contests: an open US Senate seat left by Dick Durbin's retirement, and an Illinois governor's race in which JB Pritzker is seeking a third term. The Vatican has not said how he voted and will not. His vote joins more than 43 million early ballots already cast across the United States, according to an Associated Press analysis, which puts the gesture in its true scale: statistically nothing, symbolically loud.

Our call is that both parties will try to borrow this vote and neither will be able to spend it. The record, Democratic and Republican primaries alike, denies them a mascot, and the Vatican framed the act as duty, not endorsement. What it can actually move is turnout among American Catholics who hear their own church's leader describe voting as something citizens owe, in a midterm where participation is usually the whole contest. One ballot in Will County changes no result. A first, from that pulpit, might change a few thousand mornings on Tuesday, and midterms have been decided by less.