How Did Chicago’s Aldermen Vote on the 2021 Budget?

We tracked Chicago City Council’s budget votes from 2010 to 2021.

By Kelly Garcia and Corli Jay

Updated November 24, 2020

Each year Chicago’s 50 aldermen vote on an annual budget proposed by the mayor. At least 26 must agree on a budget before Dec. 31 of each year, and because of a $1.2 billion deficit due to the coronavirus pandemic, this year’s was the most contentious process in a long time.

In a historic vote, 21 aldermen voted against Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s budget on Tuesday—setting a new record. The last time City Council counted that many dissenting budget votes was 1991 when 18 aldermen rejected former mayor Richard M. Daley’s 1992 budget proposal. Ultimately, Lightfoot’s budget passed for 2021 with 29 ‘yes’ votes.

We created a tracker of each alderman’s previous budget votes to give Chicagoans a sense of how mayoral budgets have faired in City Council over the past 30 years. Scroll to see previous years.

How Have Aldermen Voted from Past to Present

Discover how all aldermen have voted since 1990 in our open-source dataset.

I saw that @city_bureau posted some amazingly clean data about Chicago City Council's budget voting history (linked below), so of course I made a viz so that constituents can see their alderperson's vote history. pic.twitter.com/u6cIdGIaFw
— Courtney Guc (@CourtneyGuc) December 2, 2020