Split Cook County from Illinois? A ballot question for some voters this fall
ILLINOIS – Should Cook County, home to Chicago and sprawling suburbs, break away from Illinois to form a new state? Voters in several Illinois counties could encounter a striking question, similarly phrased, on their ballots this fall.
The vote, however, is non-binding and doesn’t ensure such a change would happen. Instead, it serves as a declaration from voters toward the possibility of splitting Cook County from the rest of Illinois.
The Center Square reports that at least seven counties intend to vote on a ballot question around that possibility this November, including Calhoun, Clinton, Greene, Iroquois, Jersey, Madison and Perry counties. Four of the seven counties (Calhoun, Clinton, Jersey and Madison) are within the Greater St. Louis Metropolitan Area.
The ballot question ahead for voters will read as such:
Shall the board of _______ County correspond with the boards of other counties of Illinois,
outside of Cook County, about the possibility of separating from Cook County to form a
new state and to seek admission to the Union as such, subject to the approval of the people?
https://www.ourquadcities.com/news/state-news/illinois-news/split-cook-county-from-illinois-a-ballot-question-for-some-voters-this-fall/amp/
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This is nothing more than a transparently desperate attempt on the part of down state Republicans to get rid of all those pesky Democrats in Chicago. Democrats control the state government right now, and Red County Repubs are tired of it. Too bad, so sad. 
Thi idea is collossally dumb for multiple reasons, including Chicago area geography. Cook County is bordered by 5 other counties, and there are many suburbs that the county line cuts right through. One example is Barrington, where my daughter and her BF live. The line between Lake and Cook counties is literally the street they live on. They're in Lake County; cross the street and you're in Cook County, even though you're still in Barrington. I'm sure there are lots of other examples.
Sorry, down staters, this is not going to fly, for way too many reasons to list here. Cook County will laugh its collective ass off at this exercise in futility. Same with the collar counties, such as the one I live in.
That may be the craziest part of the whole thing!
According to the op, the actual ballot question is as follows:
So I guess they're asking the voters of each County to vote on whether to give their county board permission to "correspond with the boards of other counties of Illinois, outside of Cook County" about getting on board with this. It sounds like they think if they get enough other counties to join them, those counties can all somehow get together and kick Cook County out of the state or something. That's how I read it, anyway.
There may be quite a few red counties in the state that would go for this, who knows. But the chance of actually separating Cook County from any other part of the state seems about as likely as teaching an aardvark to sing!
On a color coded map, the areas that tend to vote Democratic look like blue islands floating in a sea of red. However, there are a few more blue areas than you might think.
The map below, from the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at SIU , shows which counties in Illinois went predominately for Biden and which for TSF in 2020. Besides the Chicago area and Champaign County, there are 6 or 7 other other blue counties (depending on whether you count Winnebago County as part of the Chicago area).
The blue counties are all either relatively densely populated, the home of a large university, or both. The red counties, otoh, are mostly (not all) rural and sparsely populated. As many red counties as there are, their combined population is less that that of the blue counties.
In other words, there are actually a lot of Democratic voters in this state. They're just concentrated in certain areas, while Republicans are more widely but also much more thinly scattered. And the Republicans in those areas are not pleased about Democrats having so much control over what happens in this state.
