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Ellen Corley, born in Georgia and a progressive Democratic candidate for Illinois’s 5th Congressional District, brings four decades of real-world experience to a campaign built on one core conviction: The hidden machinery of corruption - inside government, finance, and media - must be exposed and dismantled before it destroys what remains of American democracy.

A former high school teacher turned marketing research consultant with an M.B.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Corley entered public life in 2008 when the financial crisis caused many families to lose their homes. People's ruin ignited a decade-long investigation into police brutality, wrongful convictions, and the flow of dark money that shields both. From organizing with the Chicago Alliance for Racist Political Repression to testifying at City Hall on civilian oversight of the police, she has earned a reputation as the district’s most relentless voice for the exonerated and the erased.

Corley’s platform is unapologetically systemic. She calls for:

• Criminal justice overhaul that ends cash bail, abolishes private prisons, and re-directs federal dollars from militarized policing to restorative justice and mental health courts.
• Medicare for All funded by closing the carried-interest loophole and taxing algorithmic trades that skim billions from working families.
• Election reform that outlaws SuperPACs, mandates paper ballots, and makes Election Day a federal holiday.

She has supported police accountability for withholding torture files, who has marched with Jon Burge survivors, and who refuses corporate PAC money on principle. Her volunteers - former students, exonerated citizens, and grandmothers from Jefferson Park - knock doors with a simple question: “When was the last time your congressman fought for you instead of the donor class?”

In a district that stretches from Lake Zurich, Illinois, to million-dollar condos, to blocks still scarred by foreclosure, Corley is running to prove that government can be a solution for the many, not a shield for the few. Her slogan is borrowed from the wrongfully convicted men she has stood beside for fifteen years: “Equal rights aren’t equal until they’re enforced.”