Defending Our Elections: Planning for Public Witness

Following the passage of new anti-immigrant laws, an escalation by ICE in the Pisgah National Forest and new threats to the sanctity of this fall’s election, all enabled by white Christian nationalists, join clergy across the state to learn how to participate in powerful public Christian public witness that centers the Matthew 25 values of “love your neighbor as yourself” and protects the right to select our leaders through elections.

The Republican-controlled State Board of Elections has approved a string of party-line rule changes ahead of the midterms, letting county boards reject reasonable-impediment voter-ID ballots by a simple majority, toss absentee ballots over envelope “irregularities,” and remove people from polling places more easily. And the board voted 3–2 to use DHS’s SAVE immigration database to flag and remove suspected noncitizens from the rolls — a system experts warn wrongly flags eligible citizens. We must take action to protect the integrity of our elections, in part because conservative Christians in our state have advanced a “voter fraud”, “election integrity” narrative for years, which has enabled today’s threats to the democratic process.