The Chicago Public Square Illinois Primary Voter Guide Guide

Early and mail voting is underway in the Illinois primary. Don’t cast your ballot in ignorance. Square’s here to help.

Mark your calendar.
■ Feb. 17: Last day for regular (paper) voter registration.

■ Feb. 18: First day of grace period for in-person voter registration and voting at election authority and early voting sites; continues through Election Day.

■ March 1: Last day for regular online voter registration.

■ March 12: Last day for your election authority to receive vote-by-mail applications.

■ March 17: Election Day—from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Be ready.

■ Learn how to vote in Illinois from Capitol News Illinois and WBEZ.

■ The League of Women Voters runs down the races at stake.

■ Register to vote in Chicago and suburban Cook County.
■ Outside Cook County? Check your county’s website: DuPage, Lake, Will, Kane, McHenry, Kendall …
■ … or the Illinois State Board of Elections.

Be smart.

■ Here’s a customized ballot with all the decisions you’ll face in suburban Cook County or Chicago.
■ Every item and race on your ballot, explained: BallotReady and Ballotpedia.

■ See what’s on your ballot, courtesy of the League of Women Voters.

■ Consider the Chicago Tribune’s endorsements …

■ … and the Girl, I Guess Progressive Voter Guide.

■ Slice through all those judicial races with bar association ratings of Cook County candidates (still in progress) …

■ … and Injustice Watch’s judicial primary guide (ditto).

■ Have questions for the candidates? WBEZ wants your suggestions here.

Do it.

■ Here’s where to vote Election Day in Chicago and the suburbs.

■ Trouble at your polling place? Call 866-OUR-VOTE.

Go beyond.

■ Get updates around the clock on the Square Bluesky page.

■ Be informed for every election. Sign up for Square email, sent to your inbox (free!) weekday mornings at 10.

■ If you’ve found this useful, you can help keep Square coming with a contribution—of as little as $1, just once.

This is a work in progress.

■ Spot a mistake? Know of another source that’ll help people vote smart? Email Voterguide@ChicagoPublicSquare.com.

‘Racist and cowardly’ / Unmistakable echoes / ‘Democracy dies in oligarchy’

‘Racist and cowardly.’ Columnist Eric Zorn says University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign student Republicans should restore a widely condemned Instagram post and “marinate in the contempt of their fellow students.”

■ WBEZ: “Trans students felt threatened by this symbol of the far right. Why didn’t Northwestern intervene?”

■ Stephen Colbert almost lost it last night as he fact-checked House Speaker Mike Johnson: “You claim to know more about the Bible than the Pope. Do you also claim to poop in the woods more than a bear?”

Don’t buy it. Popular Information calls out mainstream news organizations for swallowing the Trump administration’s claim to be scaling back oppression in the Twin Cities: “On the ground, little actually changed.”

■ Law Dork Chris Geidner calls an “unfathomable” Minnesota court transcript “an absolutely necessary document to read for anyone who wants to protect the rule of law.”

■ Former Politico editor Garrett Graff outlines six ways to reform ICE and Border Patrol.

■ Satirist Andy Borowitz: “Tom Homan Demands ICE Agents Return Their Signing Bonuses to Him in Paper Bag.”

‘NIMBY, but for concentration camps.’ Columnist Dan Froomkin surveys major pushback from communities across the country as ICE tries to buy massive warehouses for transformation into prisons.

■ ProPublica exposes “the real story behind the midnight immigration raid on a Chicago apartment building.”

■ The Conversation explains that “less lethal” crowd control weapons are far from harmless.

‘Echoes from the past are unmistakable.’ Historian Heather Cox Richardson puts in context Trump’s call for his administration to nationalize this year’s midterm elections.

■ Former Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger: “Trump is panicking—and wants the Justice Department to be his revenge squad.” (Cartoon: Jack Ohman.)

■ USA Today’s Chicago-based columnist Rex Huppke: “The Republican Party’s early messaging in advance of this year’s midterm elections seems to boil down roughly to: Work longer, don’t carry guns and, as Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche recently said of the many powerful men who appear in the Jeffrey Epstein files, ‘It is not a crime to party with Mr. Epstein.’”

■ Author Seth Abramson: “Jeffrey Epstein was obsessed with my tweets just before his death—and now I know why.”

Game on. Early voting begins today in Illinois. Here’s how to do it.

■ Planning to cast your ballot by mail? Cook County Clerk Monica Gordon warns that Trump administration shenanigans mean you shouldn’t wait until the last days.

■ Add Sen. Elizabeth Warren to the roster of those backing Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton for Illinois’ Senate seat.

■ Politico: A forum for Democrats seeking the Chicago area’s 9th District congressional seat turned raucous last night.

■ Ready to decide? Tomorrow, look for the 2026 edition of the Chicago Public Square Voter Guide Guide.

‘Democracy dies in oligarchy.’ That’s Sen. Bernie Sanders’ play on The Washington Post’s old slogan after the draconian staff cuts imposed yesterday.

■ Ex-Post editor Marty Baron says the cuts will “do enormous damage to the newspaper’s ability … to cover the world in all the ways that it should.”

■ Pod Save America co-host Dan Pfeiffer: “Those moves cannot be separated from [owner and Amazon founder Jeff] Bezos’s broader effort to curry favor with Trump.”

■ Pulitzer-winning Post alumnus Gene Weingarten: “He betrayed his newspaper, and his country. And you.”

■ Jonathan Last at The Bulwark: “If a newspaper’s publisher makes a bunch of decisions that lose money, and then the owner keeps the publisher while firing the staff who puts out the paper—none of this is really about the money, is it?”

■ The New York Times’ Peter Baker does the math—showing that Bezos could absorb five years of the Post’s annual losses with what he makes in a single week.

■ The Onion: “Trump Scolds Female Reporter For Being Adult.”

‘Clean energy dies in darkness.’ The Post’s climate team’s been gutted …

■ … but the AP’s still on the job—reporting today that covering the world in carpet contaminated a region of Georgia, running up “a cost no one wants to pay.”

■ It finds “Georgia’s power structures prioritizing a prized industry over public health.”

■ And it’s not just Georgia: Those forever chemicals eventually make their way into soil and water around the world.

‘To defeat your enemy. You must know them. Melania.’ Snarky marquee messages like that got the First Lady’s hagiography yanked from a Portland-area movie theater.

■ Amid reports that the opening weekend sales for the movie may have been boosted by bulk buying, Jimmy Kimmel joked, “Send in Tulsi Gabbard and the FBI! Seize the ticket machines, the popcorn buckets, the box office receipts at every multiplex in America.”

■ Trump’s FCC chair is threatening new regulatory pressure on Kimmel and Colbert under rarely used “news distortion” rules.

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