'Registration Sunday' urges all to join faith communities in enrolling voters
Yes, Lord, it’s that easy.
Two minutes on your phone. Go to Vote411.org. Tap on “register to vote.”
Sept. 13, church communities in Kansas City will be taking a moment — whether safely distanced on sanctuary pews, or in a virtual congregations — to get unregistered voters tapping their phones.
And it’s an exercise in civic duty that can happen anywhere, spreading like the Gospel. LINC is teaming with the League of Women Voters to spur the idea through churches and out to anybody and everybody. It can happen any Sunday, any day, and any time before the registration deadline.
Missourians must register by Oct. 7. Kansans must register by Oct. 13.
“People 35 and under, quite a few don’t believe their voice has power,” said the Rev. Cassandra Wainright, president of the Concerned Clergy Coalition of Kansas City.
“We need to reach out to them so they know how important their voices are,” she said. “They will lead our country tomorrow. They need to be on the front line.”
Many young people have been caught up in the emotion of these difficult days, and older residents are being stirred — people who’ve never registered to vote before or who moved and never re-registered, said LINC Site Coordinator Darryl Bush.
On Registration Sunday, Bush imagines parents, grandparents, mentors and peers each turning to an unregistered voter they know in their family, their church community, their neighborhood — and bringing them into the power of voting.
How easy is it?
Consider the 18-year-old youth in the backseat as his family was in a car line picking up school computers and supplies before the start of the school year at Kansas City’s King Elementary.
Bush was working the line, passing out flyers on voter registration, but also insisting to anyone unregistered they could do it right now. The 18-year-old was interested, and Bush handed his own phone into the car, linked to an easy online voter registration site.
Then Bush was moving on down the line. “I forgot I gave him my phone,” he said. But minutes later, a security guard was walking toward Bush with his phone. The teen had handed it out to return it, and from inside the car, the young man called out to Bush.
“He said, ‘I did it, sir. I registered online.’”
The scenario can play out many different places and ways with the same significant result. The audience is out there. Bush saw it in the youth-dominated crowds in the Plaza in the days after the killing of George Floyd.
“I talked to young folks down there and many of them were not registered to vote,” he said.
But there is a connection in their uprising with the Civil Rights activists in generations before them who sacrificed so much to give Black Americans and others the power of the vote, Wainright said.
That’s where she believes the motivation to register begins.
“I go back to the sacrifices of our forefathers and ancestors,” she said. “They were jailed, whipped and beaten for the right.”
Registration is just the first step. Because carrying out the vote on Election Day is also a challenge, Wainright said.
“It will be difficult during a pandemic,” she said. “We will have to be creative and strategic — collaborate between faith-based and secular groups. Now is the time to make our voices heard.”
By Joe Robertson/LINC Writer