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45 Illinois Counties and Counting: Downstate Votes to Explore Secession

Bret Buganski, “Illinois secession movement grows as 12 more counties back split,” Fox 32 Chicago (Nov. 4, 2026).

On Tuesday, voters in twelve more Illinois counties, along with several Adams County townships, approved nonbinding referendums to explore separating from the state, bringing the total to 45 counties since 2020. The organizers’ grievance is simple and familiar: as one of them put it, “The state legislature tends to not take us into consideration when they’re making their laws.” The votes are only advisory, of course; carving a new state out of Illinois would require the consent of the Illinois General Assembly and Congress—that is, permission from the very rulers these voters want to leave. And Alberta’s roughly three-to-one vote last month to remain in Canada is a reminder that such movements do not win overnight. Still, PFS readers should welcome every one of these votes, for as Hoppe has long argued, in Democracy: The God That Failed and elsewhere, smaller political units must compete for residents and capital and so tend to be less exploitative than large ones. Each referendum chips away at the notion that existing borders are sacred and helps normalize peaceful exit from political arrangements nobody consented to. Who knows—someday the rest of Illinois may simply leave Cook County to govern itself.

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