With Election Day just a few weeks away, longtime church members Lucky Hartunian and Janie Booth sat outside the Revival Christian Fellowship’s sanctuary in Menifee, California, inviting congregants to register to vote.
The women urged those streaming into the evangelical church’s Saturday morning civic engagement event to “make their voices heard as Christians.” After mail-in ballots go out statewide, Booth and Hartunian will be among church volunteers collecting completed, sealed ballots and dropping them off at the county office the next day.
It’s a practice known as ballot gathering - or ballot harvesting — that’s been a source of national controversy over the years.
Robert Tyler, a California-based attorney who represents conservative churches and pastors, said he still believes “ballot harvesting and universal vote by mail creates opportunities for fraud.”
“But the rules of the game have changed,” he said. “Until the law changes, we have to get out and gather ballots like they are doing.”
As long as each of those ballots is filled out by an individual who is registered and legally able to vote, and is sealed by that person before it is handed off to whoever, I’m OK with this. I might rib them about their rank hypocrisy, but if they’re not falsifying ballots, they’re not really doing anything wrong.
Seriously, the idea of “ballot harvesting” is bullshit invented by people who just want to make it harder for people to vote because they’re afraid the people might vote against them.