MENIFEE, Calif. (AP) — With Election Day just weeks away, longtime church members Lucky Hartunian and Janie Booth sat outside the sanctuary of Revival Christian Fellowship in Menifee, Calif., urging community members to register to vote .
The women urged those who flocked to the evangelical church’s civic engagement event on Saturday morning to “make their voices heard as Christians.” After mail-in ballots are mailed statewide, Booth and Hartunian will be among the church volunteers who will collect completed, sealed ballots and drop them off at the county office the next day.
It’s a practice known as ballot harvesting – or ballot harvesting – that has caused controversy across the country over the years.
Booth said her job is a massive responsibility, but she isn’t nervous.
“A lot of people don’t trust the postal service,” she said. “I feel honored and privileged to be able to do this. I do this for my children and grandchildren.”
Dramatic change of course
Conservative voters who were skeptical about mail-in voting and ballot harvesting, a strategy often used by Democrats, are now becoming comfortable with it. Protestant Christians in particular are taking it up this year.
Conservative leaders Charlie Kirk and Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump have called on Christians and conservatives to collect ballots. Megachurches like Calvary Chapel Chino Hills in Southern California are leading the charge, encouraging — and even training — congregations to collect ballots. They praise it as a valuable tool for increasing voter turnout and electing candidates who share their views on issues such as abortion, transgender rights and immigration.
Robert Tyler, a California-based attorney who represents conservative churches and pastors, said he still believes “ballot harvesting and universal mail-in voting create opportunities for fraud.”
“But the rules of the game have changed,” he said. “Until the law changes, we have to go out and collect ballots like they do.”
To be clear, there is no evidence of widespread fraud related to mail-in voting in any state. Some isolated cases of potential fraud related to voting have been uncovered and prosecuted.
Tyler’s comments reflect a dramatic shift in policy by conservatives, some of whom amplified rumors about mail-in ballots to explain Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020. Republican leaders say this is necessary to be competitive in this year’s elections, which are likely to be decided by narrow margins in some swing states.
Trump has long criticized this method of voting as rife with fraud — an unfounded claim. Now he and other senior GOP officials are encouraging voters to cast their ballots by mail. The party has launched an attempt to “correct the narrative” on mail-in voting in a bid to persuade those turned off by Trump to reconsider for this year’s election.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, the practice of ballot harvesting, in which people selected by voters return absentee ballots on their behalf, is legal in 35 states. Rules vary, but in California, where there is no limit on how many ballots a single person can collect, a collector cannot receive compensation and must deliver the ballot in person or by mail within three days of receipt or before polls close Election day.
Training churches to collect ballots
Gina Gleason, executive director of California-based Real Impact, a ministry of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, said she saw Southern California Democrats operate this strategy to get their congressional candidate narrowly elected in 2018. In 2020, her church began collecting ballots every Sunday in the weeks leading up to Election Day.
“The voters gave us their signed and sealed ballots,” she said. “We put them in lockers and hand-delivered them to the district offices where they needed to go.”
The initiative was somewhat successful in 2020, when the church collected about 6,000 ballots. In 2022, that number rose to well over 13,000, Gleason said, adding that while most ballots came from church members and their families, some came from members of other churches who drove to Chino Hills to submit their ballots.
“This is the type of impact we are looking for that can upend school boards and make a difference in our communities by changing laws we don’t want to live under,” she said, referencing a bill passed by the Democratic governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation to prevent schools from outing transgender and gay students to their parents. “We don’t want the government telling us what we can and can’t do when it comes to the health and safety of our children.”
When she trains church volunteers, Gleason gives crucial instructions, such as making sure the outer envelope is filled out correctly and ballots are returned to the appropriate registrar’s office. Her church collects ballots from residents of Orange, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties in Southern California.
“And of course no one should be campaigning or telling people who or what to vote for,” she said.
Over the summer, Gleason trained more than 120 people from various churches who are now ready to collect ballots, including those in Menifee. She and Pastor Jack Hibbs, who leads her church, are traveling the state on their “Comeback California Tour” with the goal of “motivating and engaging Christians.”
Conservative groups hope these initiatives spread to other states. Timothy Head, executive director of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, a conservative political advocacy nonprofit, said ballot harvesting is becoming more crucial among once-hesitant churches in competitive states like Nevada and Virginia. He calls it the “crawl, walk, run effect.”
“We expect it to increase significantly this time. … Every vote counts and every attempt to maximize the number of votes counts.”
Plus, churches are a natural choice, he said.
“Churches meet at least once or twice a week. As long as they’re not explicitly partisan, it’s a great place for voters to get civically engaged.”
Hibbs spoke forcefully during the church event in Menifee, urging Christians to take a stand.
“That doesn’t mean I want a Christian nation,” he said. “I just want our country to be a place where a religious believer and an atheist have equal rights.”
He ended his discourse by telling his listeners that Trump may have become “a little shaky and shaky on abortion” and urged them to “forget (Trump’s) rhetoric and shenanigans, the crazy and inappropriate talk.”
“Fewer children will die under Donald Trump than under Kamala Harris,” he said, referring to abortions. “So that’s how I’m going to vote.”
The audience burst into applause. One man shouted, “Yes, Trump.”
The question of trust
Richard Hasen, who directs the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law, said he was not aware of any credible allegations of fraud related to ballot harvesting. He would still prefer states limit the number of ballots that can be collected.
“While it is low risk, it is not risk free and the fact that we have not seen any major problems is a good sign,” he said. “However, every time people come together to vote, you want to ensure that they are making free and fair decisions – whether it’s a church, a nursing home or a union hall.”
Former Orange County Registrar Neal Kelley believes ballot harvesting can assist raise voter turnout, but so far it hasn’t significantly affected elections. He also isn’t overly concerned about ballot tampering, a concern critics have raised about the practice in the past.
“The general public doesn’t understand all the ways we can determine that ballots have been tampered with,” he said. “We can tell when envelopes have been opened and resealed. If votes are changed, we will see a pattern.”
Ada Briceno, chairwoman of the Orange County Democratic Party, said collecting ballots allows more people to vote, particularly in communities of color where people work two or three jobs or may struggle with language issues.
“We want more people to be heard, and this is just another tool,” she said. “Republicans were all upset about mail-in ballots. And now they do it. It’s just hypocritical.”
The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, who has advised Trump, said he sees nothing wrong with churches collecting ballots.
“If other community groups are doing it, why not churches?” he said. “I have no doubt that churches will ensure that everything is done legally and correctly because they have a higher level of accountability and a moral compass of integrity – more than any other church group.”
Progressive groups also relied on churches to push through the vote, said Juan Sepulveda, a political science professor at Trinity University in San Antonio. One of the pioneering groups of such initiatives was the Industrial Areas Foundation, a national interfaith network founded in 1940 by a community organizer, a Catholic bishop and founder of the Chicago Sun-Times.
“There is a natural relationship of trust with the church,” Sepulveda said. “You didn’t have to create trust. It was already there.”
__
Associated Press religion coverage is supported by the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from the Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
