Government of Cook County, Illinois

The government of Cook County, Illinois, is primarily composed of the Board of Commissioners, other elected officials such as the Sheriff, State's Attorney, Treasurer, Board of Review, Clerk, Assessor, Cook County Circuit Court judges and Circuit Court Clerk, as well as numerous other officers and entities.

All Cook County Sheriff's Deputies have police powers regardless of their particular job function or title.

Like other Sheriffs' departments in Illinois, the Sheriff can provide all traditional law-enforcement functions, including county-wide patrol and investigations irrespective of municipal boundaries, even in the city of Chicago, but has traditionally limited its police patrol functions to unincorporated areas of the county.

Although the Highway Department was instrumental in designing many of the expressways in the county, today they are under the jurisdiction of the state.

It has voted only once for a Republican candidate in a Presidential election in the last fifty years, when county voters preferred Richard Nixon to George McGovern in 1972.

The 1970 Illinois Constitution allows the controlling party to redraw voting districts; the Democrats have done so several times, most recently in 2011, effectively gerrymandering to gain additional seats in the state congress from Republicans in the 2012 election.

[8][9][10] In the 1980s, Cook County was ground zero to an extensive FBI investigation called Operation Greylord.

To establish more localized government control and policies which reflect the often different values and needs of large suburban sections of the sprawling county, several secession movements have been made over the years which called for certain townships or municipalities to form their own independent counties.

In the late 1970s, a movement started which proposed a separation of six northwest suburban townships, Cook County's panhandle (Barrington, Hanover, Palatine, Wheeling, Schaumburg, and Elk Grove) from Cook to form Lincoln County, in honor of the former U.S. president and Illinois resident.

Peloquin argued that the south suburbs are often shunned by the city (although Chicago is not bound or required to do anything for other municipalities) and he blamed the Chicago-centric policies of Cook County for failing to jumpstart the somewhat-depressed south suburban local economy.

Pending sufficient interest from local communities, Peloquin planned a petition drive to place a question regarding the secession on the general election ballot, but the idea was not met with success.

[12] Talk of secession from Cook County amongst some outlying communities again heated up in mid-2008 in response to a highly controversial 1% sales tax hike which has pushed the tax rates across the county communities up amongst the highest in the nation.