Consider This from NPR - From Clergy to Veterans, Volunteers Rally To Fight Voter Intimidation

Episode Date: October 29, 2022

On Friday, federal authorities issued an internal bulletin that warned of the potential for violence from domestic extremists during the midterm election season.The same day, a federal Judge in Phoenix refused to stop a group from patrolling outdoor ballot boxes. Members of the group have been showing up heavily armed, often masked and wearing tactical vests. Critics say this is intimidating voters. The judge said that barring the group would violate their constitutional rights.From election deniers who continue to insist without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen, to a flood of recent state laws that make voting more difficult, for many Americans, voting feels much more fraught. But volunteers are stepping up across the country to make sure that all voters feel safe casting their ballot.Host Michel Martin talks to the Reverend Barbara Williams-Skinner of Faiths United to Save Democracy and TurnOut Sunday and Emily Eby, Senior Election Protection Attorney at Texas Civil Rights Project.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all. On the web at theschmidt.org. Hundreds of jurisdictions are still reporting a shortage of poll workers. Why? Big reasons. Concerns about their safety. Reports of voter intimidation around ballot drop boxes in Arizona. We're just out here watching boxes. Aggressive recruitment of poll watchers from groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers to be really a force for intimidation at the polls. The right to vote is at the core of this democracy.

It's a right that some have been able to take for granted, but for which others have had to fight. This election year, it seems, the fight is on again. There is a new warning from law enforcement of a heightened threat to the midterm elections, and there's new questions about the safety of elected officials. Yesterday, federal authorities issued an internal bulletin that warned of the potential for violence from domestic extremists during this midterm election season.

But also yesterday, a federal judge in Phoenix refused to stop a group from patrolling outdoor ballot boxes. Members of the group have been showing up heavily armed, often masked and wearing tactical vests. Critics say this is intimidating and uncalled for. But a judge said that barring the group would violate their constitutional rights. Attorney General Merrick Garland, speaking to journalists about this earlier this week, said the Justice Department is on alert. Justice Department has an obligation to prevent, to guarantee a free and fair vote by everyone who is qualified to vote and will not permit voters to be intimidated.

Still, the fallout from the January 6 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol lives on. From individuals who continue to insist without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen, to candidates who say they will not accept this year's election results unless they win, to a flood of laws passed by state governments adding new requirements to register to vote or curtailing voting times or ways to vote, it seems that voting for many Americans feels less of a routine duty than a fraught act of courage. The thing that we're really, I think, the most worried about is just voters being intimidated from coming. That's Mary McCord, executive director

of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, speaking on the PBS NewsHour. We've even heard of people questioning voters or suggesting that what they're doing by voting is illegal, particularly if they're maybe depositing a ballot of an elderly family member or friend. In this charged and sometimes poisonous atmosphere, though, some are stepping forward to protect free and fair elections, not by showing up with guns and ammo, but by showing up in other ways to lower the temperature. It's a national security issue for Americans not

to trust our elections. That's Ellen Gustafson. She is a co-founder and co-executive director of Vet the Vote. That's an organization recruiting veterans and veterans' family members to volunteer as poll workers on election day. A lot of the veterans and military family members that we've talked to care about these issues affecting our democracy at the baseline because they're a national security issue. And then they're a patriotism issue. She says she and her co-founders wanted to do something to engage veterans to help strengthen American faith in democracy. We came upon this space and this work in kind of different ways, but all really wanting to look at how our incredible community of veterans and military family members that is one of the most trusted in our country

could be of service, again, in reminding America of our common values and engaging with civics and in all kinds of manners of pro-democracy work for our country. Consider this. Efforts to make it hard, if not impossible, for some people to vote are not new. But a wave of new laws and a toxic political atmosphere could, along with a distrustful and angry electorate, redefine the landscape of voter participation in the U.S. But there are those who are stepping up to push back.

We're drawing on the tradition that John Lewis stood in, that Fannie Lou Hamer stood in, and Dr. King and so many others, that this is everybody's country and we have a right to vote in it. That's coming up. From NPR, I'm Michelle Martin. It is Saturday, October 29th. mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. And we've received several reports of poll watchers standing behind the address table and taking notes. We've also received a couple dozen reports of sort of intimidation generally. Emily Eby is the Senior Election Protection Attorney and Policy Counsel at the

Texas Civil Rights Project. She says this kind of conduct, which she considers an attempt to keep certain people from exercising their right to vote, is an ugly part of American history. Voter intimidation by poll watchers goes back to the 1870s. After Reconstruction ended, there were poll watchers who were set up to intimidate Black voters from voting. Eby and her organization are particularly concerned about the fallout from SB1, adopted by the Republican-majority Texas legislature and signed by the Republican governor last fall. Critics say it makes it harder for some people to vote by cutting down the options for voters to cast ballots. But critics are even more alarmed at the new latitude given to partisan poll watchers. She says they are already hearing about incidents

similar to what's been going on in Phoenix. Typically is people standing around the sides of the polling place. They are unobtrusive, usually. But if a poll watcher decides to interfere with a voter in the past, it would be much easier to remove them for interfering with a voter. SB1 made it much harder. We've received reports that some poll watchers in Texas have been writing down the addresses and names of voters as they check in. And there's nothing in the law that would prohibit that, right? It's extremely intimidating. She says her team is prepared to go to court to stop any attempt to disenfranchise voters.

Texas Civil Rights Project has filed litigation already in this election and won. It's one of our favorite things to do is sue to protect voters during an election. So we've been working on that and we're standing ready to do it again if we need to. And one of the things I expect to see most in this election is Texas voters continuing to defiantly vote and overcome these new hurdles that the state has put in place. But Texas voters are up to the challenge. Coming up, fighting an old battle on a new front. Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York,

working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. no evidence of voter fraud. So the fraud is that people who have lost power are perpetuating lies to stay in power. That's the fraud. That's the real voter fraud. That's the Reverend Barbara Williams Skinner. She's the coordinator of a voter education and outreach group called Turnout Sunday, which had been active in past elections in getting voters registered into the polls. But this year, she's also working with a new organization, Faiths United to Save Democracy. That's a coalition of clergy and faith leaders across traditions who are mobilizing to provide moral and legal support to vulnerable voters at polling sites across 10 battleground states. I asked her why she thinks this new group is necessary and what role she thinks clergy can play. We began to kind of move toward a more, a broader coalition to include Jewish and

imams and, you know, the Muslim community, Quakers and others, because we really saw that the same forces that were aligned against the Black vote were aligned against the Brown vote, Asian votes, Native American votes, against youth votes, against the vote of all those who are considered other in our country. And so that morphed into what we call now Faiths United to Save Democracy. That is a multi-faith, multi-racial, and multi-generation voter protection campaign. We're doing this because after the 2020 election, the same forces that attempted to tear down the U.S. Capitol to stop the Black vote, it was the Black vote, because you think about the cities that were attacked, you know, Milwaukee, Atlanta,

Philadelphia, those were the ones where the vote was questioned. The same forces that are aligned against the Black vote are now aligned against others who are committed to a multiracial democracy. That's what this fight is all about. And that's what we're standing against right now, because we believe that everyone is created in the image of God and deserve the right to a free, fair, and safe election. That's what this Faiths United to Save Democracy is rooted in the image of God and deserve the right to a free, fair, and safe election. That's what this Faiths United to Save Democracy is rooted in. So I understand that you're recruiting clergy and faith leaders from across traditions to serve as what you're calling poll chaplains. How will they work? They're not poll workers, so they're not going to be inside polling places,

you know, checking people in, and they're not poll watchers. You're saying that this group will be poll chaplains. So what will they do? How do you expect them to function? Well, they'll function in two ways. One, they'll be a moral presence. Most of them will be in sacred attire. They will come in whatever their sacred attire is. They'll have an ID badge that says Faith United to Save Democracy. Secondly, they'll provide practical support. If a voter is concerned about my polling site has changed, my grandmother needs a wheelchair, you know, my sister doesn't speak English, is there an interpreter? All of those are practical questions that they will help to answer. So they're playing a helping role as well as providing a moral

presence. On the ground, I mean, do you have a sense of where your folks will be deployed and how are you deciding where they will be deployed? Well, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights received over 200,000 complaints in the last election, largely Black, Brown, and low-income communities. And so we looked at the data for those polling sites. But then we also received from the secretaries of state and the county clerks in each of the polling areas in our 10 states, the polling sites for early voting sites for 2022, we match those and identify the polling site that had problems in the past. They're usually low income. Middle class people are not going to have their votes suppressed. They have lawyers, they have good contacts, they know how to protect themselves. It's usually the vulnerable, the elderly, the poor who are being attacked.

And that's really what our faith tradition calls us to do, to stand in the gap for those who cannot stand alone by themselves. We have the list of all the polling sites, and now our state leads, we have a state lead, mostly pastor, who've been working with us. They're very experienced. They have this list. And now they're matching up these nearly 700 poll chaplain who signed up. They've gone through training during the month of October. And now they're ready to be deployed.

So beginning Monday, they will be out there connecting and supporting. You know what I wanted to ask you, though, Reverend Skinner, is that there just seems to be a group of people in this country who believe that the previous election was stolen. There's nothing that anybody can say that seems to dissuade them from that fact. And a number of elected leaders are taking whatever steps they can take to accommodate or assuage those feelings. And some of these steps that they are taking are ones that people like yourself believe are intended to discourage certain people from voting and advantage others. And I don't know how you deal with this, what seems now to be embedded belief by a certain group of people. I mean, let's just say to say take for the sake of argument that there's some shenanigans or funny business going on. And they don't mind the fact that there are armed people showing up at these places to, you know, do whatever.

You know, they say they're securing their ballot. What do you do about that? What do you do with that? We are in what I call a three alarm fire in our democracy, to your point. If you have enough people who are being elected, and many of the people you just talked about are not only perpetrating and believing and repeating long enough over and over and over the big lie, but they're actually running on it and will maybe rule on it. The question we all have to ask ourselves is, what kind of country will we look like when democracy is no longer a reality? Because democracy is held up on the concept of one person, one vote. When that is no longer reality, then what does post-democracy mean for

any of us? It is true that if you repeat a lie long enough, you know, you won't get enough people to believe it. I really believe that there are enough people who care about this country remaining in democracy who are willing to fight for it. I mean, if you look at the vote already that has been reported as a few days ago in Georgia, over a million people have voted. So I don't believe that people are buying the lie. I think the lie has been repeated loudly, more loudly than the truth. We can't dissuade someone from something they deeply believe. What we have to do is fight to make sure those laws don't cripple us or put us back before the civil rights movement, where the 1965 Voting Rights Act is no longer a reality,

and some people can and some people cannot vote. I believe that when we get to that point, not only are we not a democracy, but it's not a safe place for anybody of any race. That was the Reverend Barbara William Skinner. She's the coordinator of Turnout Sunday and Faiths United to Save Democracy. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Michelle Martin. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography.