Early and mail ballot voting in suburban Cook County had already surpassed the 2022 gubernatorial election by nearly 30% by Monday morning, with more than 242,000 residents casting early ballots and nearly 107,000 returning mail ballots before Election Day. Another 11,000 mail ballots were still in the U.S. Postal Service pipeline, putting the county on pace to finish roughly 50,000 votes above 2022 in both early and mail voting combined.
That is why what is today’s voting has become a live question in Cook County: people are voting earlier, and in larger numbers, before the polls open for the final day. Early voting had been available at 56 locations over the last two weeks and ended Monday, leaving Election Day as the next test of how many residents still choose to vote in person.
Cook County Clerk Monica Gordon said the surge reflected an effort to make voting easier to reach, saying, “Our priority has been to make voting as convenient and accessible as possible.” The figures showed that message landing, with early voting and mail ballots both running about 50,000 ahead of 2022 levels if the current pace holds. For a county that often measures turnout in the final stretch, that is a meaningful shift: a larger share of the electorate is already decided before Election Day begins.
There was also a sharper concern hanging over the count. Some residents had worried that federal officers might appear at polling places on Election Day, but Gordon said the office had no information indicating that would happen. Illinois law protects voters from interference, intimidation and obstruction in the areas around polling places, and Gordon tried to calm nerves with a direct reminder: “No voter should ever feel intimidated, threatened or discouraged from exercising their right to vote.”
She cast her own ballot at the early voting site in the Loop at 69 W. Washington St. after the news conference, a small but telling end to a morning built around turnout, access and unease. The open question now is not whether suburban Cook County voters are showing up early. They already are. The question is how many will still come on Election Day, now that so much of the vote has been banked before it arrives.
