Leo becomes first Pope to vote in US election after submitting his mail-in ballot - The Independent

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Pope Leo XIV has submitted his vote for next week’s midterms by mail from the Vatican, making him the first pontiff ever to cast a ballot in an American election.

Leo, 71, born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago, was elected to lead the Roman Catholic Church in May 2025 following the death of Pope Francis but has not returned to the U.S. since becoming the leader of the church.

The Chicago Sun-Times was the first to report his registration for a mail-in ballot with the Will County Clerk’s office in Illinois, His Holiness doing so by giving an address in the Windy City’s southwestern suburb of New Lenox.

Kim Fladhammer, the office’s chief of staff, confirmed to the newspaper: “Robert Francis Prevost is on the list of individuals who requested a vote by mail ballot for the upcoming election.”

Records show Pope Leo has previously voted in presidential elections, as well as both Republican and Democratic primaries, although he did not vote in Illinois’s primaries in March this year.

Next week’s midterms have been widely interpreted as a referendum on Trump’s record in office and the president himself has urged conservatives to turnout as though he were on the ballot, a strategy that threatens to backfire given his deep unpopularity and dismal approval ratings.

Current polling suggests opposition Democrats are on course to win back the majority in the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate, empowering them to launch investigations into the president and his inner circle, block his legislative agenda and render him in a lame duck.

Trump previously sparred with Leo earlier this year over the Iran war, risking upsetting American Catholics by calling the pope “weak” and “terrible” after Leo wrote on X: “Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”

Trump then reposted a potentially blasphemous AI image of himself as the son of God healing the sick, which he later backed away from by suggesting he had assumed he was being cast as a doctor, not the Messiah.

In the ensuing uproar, the president was compared unfavorably to Adolf Hitler by one Italian historian and Vice President JD Vance, a fairly recent Catholic convert, advised Leo to “be careful” when discussing theology.

The president subsequently attacked the pope again over Iran, saying he was “endangering a lot of Catholics” by opposing his efforts to stop the theocratic regime in Tehran obtaining a nuclear weapon.

More recently, Leo offered what was interpreted as a veiled jab at Trump when he told journalists joining him on a visit to France, “You are all welcome,” a seemingly innocuous pleasantry that just might have been a sly reference to the president’s attempt to bar CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House.

His Holiness underwent an operation earlier this month to treat his lung cancer but has recovered sufficiently to press on with a 12-day tour of Argentina, Uruguay and Peru beginning on November 6, three days after U.S. voters go to the polls.