Illinois residents heading to the polls in November to register their choices for president and a host of lower offices will also have the option to weigh in directly on three policy issues.

Voters will be asked if millionaires should help fund property tax relief, whether insurance should cover in vitro fertilization and if there should be civil penalties for candidates who interfere with election workers.

“All three of the issues that we’re talking about have been at the forefront of political discourse and discussion,” said Democratic state Rep. Jay Hoffman of Swansea, who sponsored the legislation to get the advisory questions on the ballot.

The results of the three referendums are nonbinding and do not carry the power of law. But, in addition to potentially driving election turnout, they could show district-by-district support for specific policies and, if passed overwhelmingly, provide more firepower behind policies promoted by the General Assembly’s Democratic supermajority. A 2014 ballot question on minimum wage, for example, preceded 2019 legislation that ramped up the rate and will bring it to $15 an hour at the start of next year.

“We’re really testing what the voters believe, and whether or not they believe that the legislature and the governor should address issues that are contained in the advisory referendum,” Hoffman said.

Democratic lawmakers quickly passed a mini election omnibus bill this spring that included the three questions, precluding the possibility of any petition-driven issues appearing on the ballot because state law allows only three statewide referendums.

“These are questions that were designed for political effect,” said Republican state Rep. Ryan Spain of Peoria, who sits on the ethics and elections committee — specifically driving Democratic voter turnout and “blocking any other topics from appearing on the ballot,” he said.

The omnibus bill also included a provision, backed by Gov. JB Pritzker, preventing the slating of legislative candidates for the November election in races where political parties did not field contenders. But that issue remains in legal limbo after the Illinois Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that found the measure unconstitutional.

Taxing high earners for property tax relief

Pritzker suffered the biggest defeat of his tenure when a 2020 referendum to enact a graduated income tax was rejected by voters.

Voters now will get a chance to let their feelings be known on another way to tax high-earners: amending the state constitution to tack on an additional 3% tax on income greater than $1 million in order to fund “property tax relief.”

Because the question is nonbinding and deals with a constitutional amendment, it would have to both go before the General Assembly and be passed by a supermajority of lawmakers, and then be put on the ballot as a binding question. Only if that question passes would the amendment be added to the constitution. Specifics for the policy would have to be worked out along the way.

Property taxes are perennially a hot-button topic for Illinois politicians and top of mind for voters. Collections in the south suburbs this year dropped in part because of a record spike in tax bills, according to a recent report from Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas. The same report found that the collections rate for the 2023 tax year in the Chicago area was the lowest in more than a decade.

Adding a 3% income tax surcharge to net income over $1 million in Illinois could yield $4.5 billion in tax revenue, according to a preliminary calculation from the Illinois Department of Revenue.

The prospect of generating that kind of revenue by taxing people with an income most residents can only dream about might make the referendum an easy sell politically, even with few specifics. Former Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn, a longtime advocate for property tax relief and chair of the committee backing the referendum, said he thinks voters will find the referendum easier to understand than the 2020 question on the graduated income tax.

But at a recent legislative hearing, questions were raised from both sides of the aisle. Republican Rep. Steve Reick of Woodstock didn’t dispute that many voters would find the tax proposal appealing.

“When you rob Peter to pay Paul, you will always get the support of Paul,” he said, while also acknowledging that property taxes in the state are “out of control.”

But he criticized the idea of a constitutional provision that some “people should be paying somebody else’s property taxes.”

“Basically, it’s, ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme. Me, me, me. I want some. Give me more. And you’re not talking about the real things that are driving the cost of government up in this state,” he said.

During the same hearing, Rep. Margaret Croke, a North Side Democrat, said she had concerns about putting a specific income level in the constitution, given inflation, and in an interview called the referendum’s proposal a “Band-Aid.”

“I don’t see how this really addresses the real problem of property tax reform,” Croke said.

Quinn said putting an exact dollar figure in the proposal is important so that voters understand who the change will affect. If lawmakers lay out a plan implementation, the income level could also be indexed to the cost of living, he suggested.

A similar nonbinding “millionaire tax” question appeared on the ballot in 2014, when Quinn was governor. It passed but lawmakers never followed up with the steps necessary to make it law.

Coverage for IVF

Voters will also be asked whether IVF and other “medically appropriate assisted reproductive treatments” should be covered by insurance plans that cover other pregnancy benefits.

The question comes amid attempts by some conservatives to curb IVF after the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. Earlier this year, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are the legal equivalent of children. Iowa’s House of Representatives passed a bill that would have criminalized the death of an “unborn person” in a way that might have threatened IVF, but the state Senate didn’t take it up.

Illinois is already a national leader in IVF coverage, Dr. Jennifer Hirshfeld-Cytron, vice president and IVF medical director at Fertility Centers of Illinois, said. But many people still find themselves uninsured or underinsured for fertility treatment when they want to start a family, she said.

Infertility “should be viewed like a disease, like any disease, and therefore it should be covered,” Hirshfeld-Cytron said.

Stephanie Vojas Taylor, a lobbyist who is a patient at the fertility center and is advocating for IVF access in her personal time, said when she first sought IVF treatment, she found that she was not covered by her insurance despite Illinois lawmakers’ previous moves to protect the treatment.

The policy proposed on this year’s ballot may not have helped, because her employer at the time was based in Wisconsin, not Illinois. But she said she’s continuing to advocate for wider IVF coverage so that others don’t have to do as she did, paying completely out of pocket for an expensive treatment that allowed her to have her now 4-year-old son.

“When you’re in the position that the only sort of way to try to start your family is through this medical procedure called IVF, the controversy sort of falls out of sight,” Vojas Taylor said.

Illinois Right to Life, an anti-abortion organization, opposes the IVF process, Executive Director Jaclyn Cornell said. Voting on the measure is important because it will show “how voters feel concerning life,” Cornell said.

Planned Parenthood Illinois Action is pushing for support on the question and during a recent day of action had supporters knock on 5,000 doors to promote the referendum, director of strategy Claire McNorton said.

Protecting election workers

A third question will ask if candidates on Illinois ballots should be subject to civil penalties if they interfere “with an election worker’s official duties.”

Local election leaders across the country are increasing security this year, as workers have become the targets of threats primarily from people responding to false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, Associated Press recently reported.

Scott Erickson, the Republican county clerk in Knox County and president of the Illinois Association of County Clerks and Recorders, said he supports the concept behind the ballot question but with some hesitation, because he feels election workers already have some protections. He also didn’t want to see the issue become more partisan.

Election workers “should not be harassed and harangued and bothered while they’re trying to do their jobs, but that being said, I also do not want to put something into place that could be weaponized,” Erickson said.

At least one culture-war topic was blocked from appearing on the ballot by the Democrats’ move to quickly pack it with three questions of their choosing. A conservative group had pushed for a ballot question on whether parents should be notified of any nonemergency medical procedure including gender-affirming treatment, but the group did not get enough signatures by the time Democrats had passed their election legislation.