Questionable Crests, Cutting Room Classics Found Among Unreleased Illinois Flag Designs
SPRINGFIELD, IL — Voting starts next month in the Illinois Secretary of State’s non-binding poll of potential new state flags.
Ahead of the vote, which in accordance with traditional Illinois political folkways will allow more than one vote per person and be limited to a slate of 10 candidates picked by appointed officials, Patch has obtained copies of all the flag designs received by state officials during the seven-week submission period.
The 4,844 flag design submissions received include dozens of duplicates, some apparently submitted accidentally. Dozens more were submitted by schoolchildren as part of classroom assignments or homework, leading to many predictably flippant flag filings.
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The appointed Illinois Flag Commission was originally required by state law to convene by September 2023. When it failed to do so, lawmakers amended the law to extend the deadline.
Nonetheless, the commission, chaired by Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias or his designee, also missed this year’s the extended deadline to meet. When it did finally meet, the group held only three meetings before releasing a list of 10 finalists earlier this month.
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Their release was met with indifference from the public, with many observers questioning whether the 10 finalists selected by the commission were really the best options.
So Illinois Patch filed a public records request with the Secretary of State’s Office in order to determine if there were, in fact, superior potential flags left on the commission’s cutting room floor.
Patch has reviewed all the submissions and identified a boatload of submissions that appear to be of equal or superior quality to the finalists picked by the flag commission, some of which are presented below.
Representatives of Giannoulias’s office claimed to be unable to provide copies of the flag submissions in their original formats, so many of them appear pixelated from the low-resolution documents his office provided.
“We do not have the capacity to manually retrieve each original image from our system, upload, and transmit it in its original format,” Danielle Pappas, the office’s deputy general counsel, told Patch.
While Illinois’ current flag is regarded as one of the worst in the nation, ranking 49th among U.S. states and Canadian provinces by the North American Vexillological Association, Gov. JB Pritzker has declared himself a fan.
“I really like our current flag. I also like the designs that were put forward,” Pritzker said earlier this month.
“Don’t want to sound too political about that, but I mean I think a lot of effort was put in,” he said. “I am glad, though, that we’re at least considering all the options here and what we end up with will be a choice that the public makes.”
In fact, residents are not “considering all the options” and there is no guarantee that “what we end up with will be a choice that the public makes.”
Regardless of the results of the six-week voting period starting next month, there is no guarantee that the state will adopt a new flag anytime soon — or that the public will ever have a say in the matter in an actual advisory referendum.
In addition to our selection of the “best of the rest” of the flag submissions that follows, Patch has also highlighted some of the worst beneath them.
Best of the Rest
Best Of The Worst
More: All 4,844 submissions compiled in an 1,878-page PDF file
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