Poll chaplains' national mission: To protect the 'sacred right' to vote

On Election Day 2024, the Rev. Dontá McGilvery plans to be outside an Arizona polling place, doing his damnedest to save American democracy from going to hell.

“The chaos is increasing the closer we get to Election Day,” he said. “We are called by God to do justice, and as clergy that means to put yourself in the midst of where the potential chaos is.”

McGilvery serves as pastor of outreach and social justice at Phoenix’s First Institutional Baptist Church, but on that day, he’ll enlist in a more civic-minded role as one of the hundreds of nonpartisan, so-called “poll chaplains” sentried outside national polling places to ensure people feel empowered to exercise their right to vote.

Nationally, religious leaders say such efforts align with their faith callings and are crucial at a time when voting itself has become politicized. Voter suppression efforts, disinformation and violent rhetoric, they say, have undermined people’s confidence in the process and eroded their sense of security.

“Protecting the rights of voters is something that should matter to all Americans,” said the Rev. Adam Russell Taylor, among the leaders of Faiths United to Save Democracy, which operates the nation’s largest poll-chaplain initiative. “We want to be messengers of truth, combatting disinformation and providing moral witness around the need to finish this election in a way that is fair and safe.”

Mudslinging on both sides has intensified in recent years, with polling sites and vote-counting centers dragged into the battle. The election outcome has been cast in apocalyptic proportions, with each side preaching that should the other side prevail, the forces of evil will have won.

Marching into that fray will be hundreds of poll chaplains and peacekeepers – priests, pastors, rabbis and imams as well as nuns, deacons, choir directors, or Sunday school teachers. Their mission: To be a calming and moral presence, to field questions about the election process and to employ de-escalation techniques to prevent or quash any efforts to harass or intimidate voters.

Results of a poll released in August 2022 showed only 41% of voters feel safe at polling places, including just 28% of Black people and 37% of Latinos. A third of those surveyed worried about weapons at polling places, while 3 in 10 said they feared polling-place harassment of Black or Latino voters.

Bridget Moix, who served as a poll chaplain in Ohio in 2022, recalled being outside a Cincinnati area polling site when a young Black man approached the site nervously before going inside. When he finally exited, she said, his demeanor had completely transformed, all smiles.

"Looks like that went well," she told him as he passed.

"'Yeah,'" she recalled him replying. "'I thought there would be guys with guns here.'"

“That stuck with me,” said Moix, general secretary for Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker peace and equality organization that is among Faiths United for Democracy's national partners. “I’m certainly sobered by the realities we are facing as a nation and trying to be prepared for whatever might happen at my individual polling station and in the broader electoral environment.”

Protecting the 'sacred right to vote'

Along with Arizona and Ohio, the Faiths United to Save Democracy campaign’s approximately 1,000 poll chaplains and peacekeepers will target key zip codes in eight other battleground states – Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin – where Edection-Day problems are believed to be more likely.

The effort is part of the campaign’s broader efforts to uphold the integrity of the American democratic process through an interfaith coalition led by Sojourners, a national faith-based media and advocacy organization; Skinner Leadership Institute in Baltimore; and the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University.

“We think everybody’s well-being as Americans is on the line,” said Barbara Williams-Skinner, Skinner Leadership Institute’s co-founder and CEO. “This is about making sure the sacred right to vote is safeguarded for everyone, particularly the most vulnerable.”

The Jan. 6 insurrection of 2021 ushered in what a Reuters investigation showed is the largest and most enduring rise in American political violence since the 1970s.

The news agency has documented more than 300 incidents since – including a pair of assassination attempts this year on Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump and several recent shooting incidents at a Democratic campaign office near Phoenix that forced the site’s closure earlier this month. A Maricopa County Attorney's Office prosecutor said a 60-year-old man arrested Tuesday in connection with the shootings was "preparing to commit an act of mass casualty" after authorities found more than 100 guns in his home.

Just 17 states have clear bans against guns at polling places, according to the Movement Advancement Project, and seven more have prohibited them, in part.

Other sites related to the voting process have also come under attack: The day after the 2020 election, police removed protesters from a vote-counting center in Detroit for disrupting the process and intimidating workers. The protestors, many incited by Trump’s baseless claims of fraud on social media, banged on the center’s windows and doors as a truck circled the site with a voice on loudspeaker repeating the charges.

In 2022, masked and armed members of a group monitoring ballot drop boxes in Arizona were ordered to stay at least 250 feet away after complaints of voter intimidation.

Sometimes it’s the poll chaplains themselves who are harassed. McGilvery, co-state lead of the national campaign’s Arizona efforts, recalled an Election Day incident in 2022 when he and April Hawkins, who also serves as a pastor at First Institutional Baptist, were stationed outside a polling site at the Burton Barr Central Library in downtown Phoenix.

Having seen McGilvery and Hawkins in their collars, an elderly man who had just voted approached them and asked what they were doing. When Hawkins explained their roles as poll chaplains and members of a local church, the man asked her for whom she had voted as a Christian.

“She said, ‘We’re just glad you cast your ballot,’” McGilvery remembers.

The man wouldn’t let up, pressing the two about whether they’d voted a certain way. The man’s wife soon joined in, echoing her husband’s sentiments, with the couple becoming more irate as a crowd began to form.

“I just said, ‘We’re so glad you voted. Have a great day,’” McGilvery said. “He was like, ‘You’re not real Christians.’ The whole episode lasted about 10 minutes.”

The poll chaplains’ calm demeanor was meant as much to reassure other voters as it was to keep tensions from escalating, he said, and their mission is even more important now.

“Our hope is that people will see us and feel some sense of security and calmness, knowing there are faith-based organizations helping to protect them,” McGilvery said.

Aiming to restore faith in the election process

Faiths United to Save Democracy grew out of a previous effort, Lawyers & Collars, that had united attorneys and clergy to protect the rights of primarily Black voters. The group changed its name as it became a more multi-faith, multiracial national coalition of more than 50 denominations and other religious groups, built around the idea that protecting the right to vote is a core expression of one’s faith.

“The right to vote has become overly politicized,” said Taylor, of Sojourners. “We want to restore faith in the elective system and make the right to vote a moral and bipartisan cause.”

Mobilizing Election Day poll chaplains and peacekeepers marks the campaign’s third phase, following voter education efforts and meetings with election officials to build relationships and let them know the campaign will hold them accountable throughout the process.

Sites selected to be staffed by poll chaplains are within zip codes identified as vulnerable locations, generally impoverished areas where voter suppression efforts like new voter identification requirements or barriers to mail-in voting have occurred, or where threats of violence have taken place.

“The civil rights movement helped to win everyone the freedom to vote, but it came at great cost and sacrifice, and the Black church played a great role,” Taylor said. “We feel like we’re carrying on some of that tradition.”

In Georgia, the Rev. Cynthia Hale worries about the threat of violence given the political atmosphere. In 2020, she said, “we had situations where men have driven by in pickup trucks with guns in the back, and we don’t know how far those threats are going to go.”

Hale, founder and senior pastor of Ray of Hope Christian Church in Decatur, Georgia, leads the national campaign’s state efforts.

“It’s a consequential election, and our democracy is on the line,” she said. “I have confidence that our secretary of state has done everything possible to make sure we have a safe, free and fair election.”

That kind of accountability is crucial, she said, especially given the accusations of voter fraud that followed the 2020 election in Georgia. Such disinformation remains rampant despite multiple audits that showed no evidence of wrongdoing.

“All eyes are on us and we want to make sure we get it right, that we don’t have any trickery,” Hale said.

Some of the polling places at which Georgia’s 60-plus poll chaplains will be stationed in Atlanta, Macon and Savannah have been hampered by sparse or undependable voting machines, she said.

“These are places where they tend to break down,” Hale said. “There are longer lines. People are basically inconvenienced in every way possible.”

In Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Council of Churches partnered with the Wisconsin Interfaith Voter Engagement Campaign to launch a state program that will place more than 70 poll chaplains at polling sites in cities such as Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay and Racine.

“Their role is to be present on election day and be a peaceful presence at the polls,” said the Rev. Breanna Illéné, the council’s director of ecumenical innovation and justice initiatives. “We recognize that there are questions about our democracy and folks who may not feel safe.”

Illéné said the program’s poll chaplains are clergy who will be at polling sites to help answer questions, “but it’s also about adding that layer of trust in case there are issues – like ‘Hey, I was there, and I saw that the process worked well.’”

As with the national campaign, Wisconsin’s effort aims to monitor the state’s checks and balances and to help people understand and trust what can be a complex and lengthy process.

Given the political climate, she said, clergy are overwhelmed, anxious and eager to be involved.

“We said, let’s identify one way and provide a really clear ask,” Illéné said. “Have them show up on election day and be a friendly, smiling face and invest in this process. People see our current political division, and it’s helpful to give them something to do.”

'We will be vigilant'

For its 2024 campaign, Faiths United to Save Democracy added a fourth phase given the events that followed the 2020 election, including the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, with plans to monitor state vote counting and certification processes to prevent sabotage.

This year’s efforts will extend beyond election day, with prayer vigils planned and poll chaplains assigned to locations where subsequent phases of the election process, such as the meeting of the electors, will be conducted – up to and including inauguration day.

“We will be vigilant through Jan. 6 when electoral votes will be counted by Congress, and through Inauguration Day,” Taylor said. “We have seen officials refuse to reject political violence or to accept the outcome if they don’t win, and this has arguably been the most volatile environment we’ve had in a long time.”

Faith leaders involved in these projects see their goal of protecting the democratic process as part of their spiritual duties. Hale, Georgia’s campaign lead, said principles of justice and equality align with major faith teachings of love for God and one’s neighbor.

“Voting is a precious gift that has been given to us as Americans, and as people of faith it’s important for us to make sure everyone has the opportunity to participate in a safe and fair way,” Hale said.

Taylor agreed.

“Essential to many faith traditions is the commitment to protect the most marginalized,” he said, and given rising voter suppression efforts, “we see this is part of our core commitment since it’s often poor voters who are targeted. We think our democracy is stronger when more people are able to exercise their freedom to vote.”

In Phoenix, McGilvery said he’s inspired by the fact that faith leaders were among those leading the charge during the civil rights movement.

“Initiatives like this show that faith leaders are still on the ground and putting themselves on the line, understanding that anything can happen,” he said.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: For poll chaplains, protecting voting rights is a calling