Poor People’s Campaign and clergy gathering combats voter suppression

Caitlin Swain of Forward Justice. | Forward Justice

WASHINGTON—A Poor People’s Campaign strategy session among clergy from around the U.S., called to discuss how to register and mobilize poor and low-wealth people to vote this fall, pivoted into how to protect those voters against right-wing intimidation, disinformation, and voter suppression.

The Rev. William Barber II, the campaign’s co-chair, finished his short introduction about the game-changing impact higher turnout by poor and low-wealth people could have on races up and down the ballot. “We need to speak truth to power,” he said. “We must tackle all forms of oppression together.”

Poor and low-wealth voters “represent at least 30 percent of the potential electorate, and around 40 percent in battleground states,” the Poor People’s Campaign adds. But those voters don’t turn out as often as other voters do, because politicians don’t seek them out or listen to their needs. Nevertheless, poor and low-income voters have the power to decide election outcomes in every state, the campaign contends.

Barber then turned the meeting over to noted North Carolina voting rights attorney Caitlin Swain, co-director of Forward Justice. And queries started to fly from more than a dozen of the 150 local religious leaders from around the U.S. who attended, plus a reporter.

News of voter suppression already occurring in South Carolina, Tennessee, North Carolina, and especially Texas prodded the questioners.

In the worst case, right-wing Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently bragged about knocking a million people, almost all voters of color, off the rolls. And extreme rightist Attorney General Ken Paxton, also a Republican, sent troopers around to intimidate people who try to register new voters.

“In North Carolina and across the South, we have been laboratories for racial oppression and authoritarianism for decades. And we’ve had a particular backlash for the last 11 years,” she elaborated. The backlash began when the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican-named majority gutted key sections of the Voting Rights Act in its Shelby County vs Holder case from Alabama.

The justices threw out the “preclearance” system at the law’s core. Preclearance mandated that jurisdictions with a history of repression based on race, religion, or gender had to get the federal Justice Department’s prior approval of voting changes to ensure non-discrimination against minorities.

With that safeguard gone, Swain said voters in 28 states, North and South, covering more than half of the nation, “face restrictions not in place” during the last presidential election. And 21 of those states enacted further curbs since the 2022 midterms.

Put in place to dilute power

“They were put in place to dilute the power of the people to make decisions about their own future,” she said. “There is the electorate that must be touched” by Poor People’s campaigners.

That electorate is the 85 million poor and low-income eligible voters in the U.S., the campaign’s data says. “But they”—the voters—“will face greater hurdles than they did in 2020,” Swain warned.

To combat the repression, as tax-exempt non-profit organizations, the synagogues, churches, and mosques “can encourage civic participation” and set up non-partisan efforts such as get-out-the-vote drives and rides to the polls. Swain distributed a two-page “Bolder Advocacy” summary fact sheet of “do’s and don’ts” for religious groups.

Individual longer booklets, covering what’s permitted and what isn’t, state by state, are downloadable from the Alliance for Justice website, www.afj.org. The alliance is one of many organizations also involved in battling voter repression this year.

Congregations can also send members to special training to be poll-watchers themselves, armed with skills to ferret out repressors, de-escalate confrontations, or, if that doesn’t work, call a toll-free number, 1-866-OURVOTE, to summon non-partisan voting rights attorneys to the scene.

But religious leaders “have to stop short of telling people how to vote or whom to vote for,” Swain warned. Left unsaid: For several decades, right-wing evangelical pastors—whom Barber often denounces as not following Christian teachings—are de facto precinct captains for parishioners.

That’s been especially true in the last eight years, as those preachers pushed the cause of serial abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump, again the Republican presidential nominee. Many of those pastors also link corporate capitalism to religious faith. That bond also draws Barber’s criticism.

To combat the rising oppression the group discussed being both proactive, training congregation members not just in registering voters, but ensuring they register properly and stay registered. If there’s flak, Swain said, the toll-free number would reach teams of trained election attorneys who can step in to halt pre-election authoritarianism.

All this is “to ensure we have peace at the polls and that we have neither hate nor discrimination” there, Swain said. “We are tracking trends across the country. If we find” the repression “comes from a [political] party, there are legal actions we can take.”

“If you come across disinformation or misinformation” before the election “report it” to the toll-free number, she explained. “And Repairers of the Breach,” the parent sponsor of the Poor People’s Campaign, “will have poll monitoring, training people how to have de-escalation.”

Publicity in advance can also suppress the repression, she said. Swain and Barber urged the religious leaders to set up committees in each institution for registration, get-out-the-vote, combatting disinformation, and, when needed, holding press conferences to denounce repression.

“If we get the [truthful] information out early enough, we can take action to stop” voter repression “from continuing,” Swain said.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Mark Gruenberg

Award-winning journalist Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.