A precinct is the smallest unit an election is run in, and it is what assigns your polling place. It is not a district anybody is elected from. Illinois runs its elections through separate authorities — each county, plus several cities that run their own — and each of them draws and numbers its own precincts. This page finds the one that covers any point, in Chicago and in 82 counties besides.
Find your precinct →Opens the map with both precinct layers on. Only the one that applies where you click will answer, so you can leave both switched on.
Nobody represents a precinct
This is the part worth saying first, because it is the one thing a precinct lookup cannot give you. No officeholder is elected from a precinct. It is an administrative unit for counting votes, not a seat. If you are looking for a person, the district you want is your ward, your county board district, or your state legislative district, and each of those has its own card.
What the precinct does decide is where you vote, and for the counties that publish that assignment, the card names the building.
What the lookup shows
Two layers cover Illinois, because Chicago's elections are run by a different authority from the rest of Cook County, and the two publish separately.
- Ward Precinct — inside the city. The card gives the precinct number and the ward it sits in, and switching it on drops the ward to an outline so the precincts show inside it. That is the whole card: the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners publishes the boundary, and no name attaches to it.
- Voting Precinct — everywhere else, in 82 counties including suburban Cook. The card gives the precinct, and its township where the county names one. In 29 of those counties it also gives the polling place, and in one of them the polling place's phone number. In suburban Cook it adds the county commissioner district the precinct falls in.
Where a county publishes no polling-place assignment this project can join, the card gives the precinct and stops, and links the county clerk who does hold that answer. It does not guess which building you vote in.
Precinct, ward, township, county board district
These are four different maps and they rarely share a line.
- Precinct — the election unit. Typically a few hundred to a couple of thousand voters. Renumbered and redrawn far more often than anything else on this list, because a county can consolidate precincts between elections without redistricting anything.
- Ward — a council seat, in Chicago and in the suburbs that elect by ward. A ward contains many precincts. See who is my alderman?
- Township — a unit of government with its own elected board, assessor and highway commissioner in most of Illinois. Precincts are usually drawn inside township lines and named after them, which is why so many precinct names read as a township plus a number.
- County board district — the seat your county commissioner holds. In some counties a board district is an exact union of whole precincts; in others a district line runs straight through a precinct. See who is my county commissioner?
Why the count keeps changing
Precinct maps are the least stable civic boundaries in the state. A county can merge two precincts because turnout no longer justifies two polling places, split one because a subdivision was built, or renumber the lot after a census. Several Illinois counties consolidated precincts between 2022 and 2024, and at least one now reports under a completely different set of names than it used at the start of the decade.
That instability is also why this page will not print a statewide total. Each county's map is read from that county's own publication, and the honest answer to how many precincts Illinois has is that it depends on the day you ask and which authority you ask.
Where the data comes from
Chicago's ward precincts come from the City of Chicago Data Portal. Every other county's precinct boundary comes from that county — a GIS service, a clerk's published map, or the county's own certified election returns, depending on what the county puts out — and each one is named individually on the sources & data layers page. Polling places come from the same county that publishes the precinct, joined to it on the county's own precinct key, and the card says which election the assignment was published for where the county states it.
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