An interfaith coalition has embarked on a 100-day “vision voting” mobilization against President Donald Trump’s SAVE America Act and other voter intimidation and suppression efforts.
“We’re standing together as faith leaders, as moral leaders, as activists — we are standing strong because the denial of voting rights is violence, it is policy violence,” said Hanna Broome, director of religious affairs for Repairers of the Breach, during an Aug. 3 press conference livestreamed from Washington, D.C.
Hanna Broome
The civil rights group is organizing voter-education events and 1,000 marches to the polls for the midterm elections in November. The campaign is calling on churches, synagogues and college groups to educate and march.
The launch also marked the conclusion of 20 weeks of demonstrations in front of the White House where activists spoke against the SAVE Act, which has passed the U.S. House but is currently held up in the Senate due to insufficient support.
The measure would require Americans to provide extensive documentation to vote, including drivers’ licenses and birth certificates. Worse still, organizers said, the provisions would be financially and logistically burdensome for low-income people and require women and transgender people to produce even more documentation if birth certificate names are different from other identification.
Broome described the bill and past spending measures that have gutted SNAP benefits and Medicaid as “policy violence” against marginalized people, and an especially hard pill to swallow given the billions the administration has spent on the Iran war.
“We’re standing strong today to say that we will not be silent anymore.”
“We’re standing strong today to say that we will not be silent anymore, that we will not turn away when our neighbor is hurting, we will not turn away when their humanity is being violated, we will not turn away with these attacks against our fellow human beings,” she said.
After addressing the media, organizers led a march to the office of Senate Majority Leader John Thune to pray and deliver a letter urging the Republican to resist Trump’s demands to put the SAVE Act to a vote.
The effort is backed by Repairers of the Breach, the Moral Monday Public Pulpit Coalition, the National Council of Churches, Common Cause and numerous other faith-based activist organizations.
The coalition planned to gather again in the evening to cast the vision for the 100-day, 1,000-march plan ahead of the election, said Bishop William J. Barber II, a civil rights activist and founder of Repairers of the Breach.
The 100-day campaign will include events in every battleground and Southern state, in addition to others, in attempt to declare support for the right for all people to vote.
The balance of power in the U.S. will be decided in American communities on election day, not in the hall of the U.S. Capitol, Barber said.
It will be in the states that new state and federal legislators are elected or re-elected and where policies can be enacted to block living wages and pass voter suppression laws.
“Our job is to organize and to call people to own their power,” he said. “We’ve already had hundreds of people say we are going to lead these marches in very conspicuous ways to draw other people.”
Another goal is to text 5 million infrequent low-income voters and to knock on doors to boost voter turnout in November.
“What we should be doing is passing a new national voting rights bill expanding voting rights.”
“What we should be doing is passing a new national voting rights bill expanding voting rights rather than retrogressing because we know they can’t win a fair fight,” Barber said.
The campaign is a compassionate response to the “culture of cruelty” in the U.S., especially in regard to immigration, said Rabbi Marc Gruber, a social justice advocate with the Union for Reform Judaism in New York. “From Genesis from Leviticus, we believe in welcoming the stranger, the alien in our midst, the one who lives with us. We’re commanded to love the stranger as ourselves.”
The campaign is an expression of the calling people of faith have to nurture the well-being of others, said Bishop Phil Hirsch of the Metropolitan Washington, D.C., Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
“This is an essential way that we love our neighbors and seek the common good. Sripture calls us to pray for and engage with those in authority who have been established by God for the common good. Our church urges advocacy against voter suppression and for equal access to the ballot.