Faith communities form voter registration drive

By JOHN OLIVER MASON

Religious communities in Northwest Philadelphia have formed "Your Vote Counts," a drive to register people to vote in time for the 2004 presidential election.

Stan Diamond, a longtime member of the Germantown Jewish Centre, said of his own participation, "I'm part of the committee that's working on voter registration. I'm also involved with NIM [Northwest Interfaith Movement], and NIM is involved with the voter registration, too." Of the voter registration drive, Diamond said, "It's a NIM undertaking, and NIM represents many religious communities in the neighborhood. There are churches and synagogues that are providing manpower for this effort."

Is it important that faith communities get involved in voter registration? "I think," said Diamond, "faith communities have a unique role in it, in that they draw a certain segment of the population, and people who are participants in faith communities are more likely to be willing to join in efforts like this, and so this effort is really aimed at getting underrepresented groups registered, because in our general area, there are parts of the Northwest where people do not have a high rate of registration, and yet they have very important needs and have reasons to go to the polls. So this is really to activate that process.

"This is non-partisan," added Diamond, "and it's a non-partisan undertaking because there are groups that are involved that are non-partisan groups," such as NIM and Germantown Jewish Centre. "The people that we're targeting," he said, "for the most part are people who are probably not represented by the current government."

The focus of the drive will be on the 59th and 12th wards in Germantown, which have had low voter turnout.

Herb Levine, co-chair of the social action committee of the Germantown Jewish Centre, explained how the idea of the drive came about. "We were having a meeting," he said, "to decide what our next step around advocacy for housing and homelessness issues would be, and Stefan Presser (director of the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union) who is a member of the synagogue, came to the meeting and said, 'We have a unique opportunity that comes once every four years, which is to change the direction of public policy by registering people to vote.' We thought that was a good idea that kind of trumped anything else we could do right now, that seemed more important than anything else we could do."

Does Levine think it is important for religious communities to take on something like this? "Religious communities," he said, "have to live out their faith commitments; it's not enough to have faith on Saturday and Sunday. Religious communities are about pursuing justice or pursuing God's kingdom; however, you understand what we're called to do here. This seems like a natural outgrowth of our various religious commitments.

David Mosenkis, the other co-chair of the social action committee of Germantown Jewish Centre, said of the program, "It seems like the most effective way we could think of to empower people to make a difference, to bring improvements to their communities in this year, because of the big [presidential] election coming up in November. For people to have an impact, they need to be part of the system and be able to vote."