Tuesday’s primary election was momentous for the big changes to come in Illinois’ Congressional delegation with an open US Senate seat and four open US House seats on the ballot. It was also historic in the volume of dark money poured into federal and state legislative races—with mixed success.

Much further down the ballot, some Illinois voters were asked to weigh in on whether Illinois should participate in the new federal voucher program.

The results on those non-binding referenda are mostly in; we’ve compiled them from local election officials here. The overall vote across 29 counties and four townships, was strongly for “yes,” 65% to 35%.

This should be a concerning result for those of us who are fighting for strong public schools that serve all Illinois kids! A billionaire-funded, ultra-conservative group that opposes public schools and unions employed a crafty political strategy—local ballot measures in amenable venues—and combined it with misleading wording. Now they’ll try to use the results to claim exaggerated public support for an unpopular policy, giving public dollars to private schools.

Why shouldn’t the Governor and the General Assembly draw broad conclusions from Tuesday’s results?

• Small percentage of voters: About 1.6 million Illinoisans voted on Tuesday, but fewer than 250,000 (~15%) had a question about the voucher program on their ballot.

• Unrepresentative set of voters: Federal school vouchers are a key Trump-administration education policy priority, and the referenda were targeted to an ideologically-favorable electorate. These are also the areas with county boards who were willing to put the question on the ballot. Ballotpedia’s map illustrates this via the 2024 presidential race data. Our data from Tuesday’s vote confirm this. Republicans were about 30% of the electorate statewide on March 17th (~500K of 1.6M), but they made up about 53% of votes in locations with vouchers on the ballot. These referenda aren’t a representative cross section of the Illinois electorate.

• Misleading question wording: Wording and framing of questions has a dramatic impact on polling results. The most common wording for the ballot measure was the following:

In fact, the funds in question here are not “privately-donated”; they are federal tax dollars. Most funds will go to private, religious schools, and public schools, overall, will be harmed.

Tragically, most of these counties with referenda have few residents who could even take advantage of vouchers for private schools; most have either one or zero private schools.

Under Illinois’ now defunct state voucher program only half of the counties that had a referendum had any private schools that participated in the program. Even though counties with referenda make up about 10% of the state’s population, in the last year of the voucher program, only 3% of voucher funds and 6% of voucher students went to private schools located in those same counties:

2023-2024 Invest in Kids voucher program dollars, students and schools for counties with and without voucher referenda

When ballot measures are worded with forthright language, vouchers are not popular, including in areas that vote Republican. Both Kentucky and Nebraska voted decisively against vouchers in November 2024.

Kentucky’s Governor Andy Beschear just vetoed a bill to opt that state into the federal program—citing those very referendum results: “Here’s why I proudly vetoed the backdoor school voucher bill.“

What should public school supporters take away from these referenda results?

Public school advocates need to up their game! Nine out of ten kids in Illinois attend public school. Public schools are the heart of urban, suburban and rural communities. But our public schools are absolutely under threat right now: not just from vouchers, but from cuts to federal funding on top of decades of insufficient funding all over the state.

✶ One quick action you can take right now: Write to Governor Pritzker and your state senator and state rep. They will be the decisionmakers on whether Illinois participates in this harmful new voucher program, and they need to hear from you:

🖋NO federal vouchers in Illinois!

✶ Your electeds also need to hear from your neighbors, your colleagues, the other families at your child’s public school. Share the letter writing link. And start having in-person conversations with these same people: Have they heard about a new threat looming on the horizon of your public school’s already stressed budget? Do they know that vouchers mean that their tax dollars fund discrimination against students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ students, and immigrant students?

✶ Finally, the organization that put these referenda on the ballot has a budget hundreds of times the size of Illinois Families for Public Schools' budget. We are small and scrappy, and you get a lot of bang for your buck if you pitch in to support our work!