Souls to the Polls

Let's make it EASY to vote, and fun!

I wonder how many non-voters imagine it to be a trudge: lining up, getting verified as a registered voter, getting your ballot and sometimes waiting to get into a voting booth.

Their imaginations aren’t far off. I’m an Election Judge, processing voters, and it can be a drag at times.

But my personal feeling is that if you don’t vote, you don’t have the right to complain.

With rights come responsibilities in a democracy, and one of the most valuable rights is the freedom to vote. The corresponding responsibility is to get your ass out to the polling place.

NOTE: If your state allows voting by mail you can skip that step - but it doesn’t ensure success. In 2020 I requested a mail-in ballot, which never arrived. I went to an early voting location and was told my vote would be “Provisional,” counted only if necessary.

If you can vote early in your locality, that’s a good alternative to waiting for Postmaster General DeJoy to fail to deliver the mail. You can vote in any early voting location (correct me in the comments if this isn’t the case in your state) and don’t need to bother finding your precinct on election day (November 5th, don’t forget).

But I have a strategy to make it easy and fun to vote, using a strategy that’s been around for a while: Souls to the Polls.

We could enlist churches to take neighborhood routes to pick up voters and take them to the polling place - whether it’s for early voting or on November 5th.

Let’s have buses (or recreational vehicles) waiting at the polling places for voters to sit in, get warm, have a cup of coffee and maybe a home-made cookie, then vote.

Have local football players stand in line for the voter, until it’s nearly their turn to vote. A call to the bus gets the warm, fed, caffeinated voter moving … right to the front of the line.

Now if it’s the Democratic Party of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz organizing bus rides for voters in the battleground states, who do you think the voters are going to support. No electioneering needed.

Would churches go along with this plan? Well, it’s the least they can do for their tax exemption, I would argue. But it might be a good way to let people know that the church is one that is in the business of helping people, even in this most basic act of citizenry.

They should be free to promote their services, and might even pick up a member or two.

Souls to the Polls works in some places. Why couldn’t we make it work everywhere?