By DEEPA BHARATH Associated Press

MENIFEE, California (AP) — 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.

Booth said her task is a big responsibility, but she’s not nervous.

“A lot of people don’t trust the mail,” she said. “So I feel honored and privileged to do this. I’m doing this for my kids and grandkids.”

Dramatic Change of Course

Conservative voters who have been skeptical of mail voting and ballot gathering – a strategy often used by Democrats – are now warming up to it. Evangelical Christians, in particular, are embracing it this year.

Leading conservative figures 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, urging – even training – congregations to collect ballots. They praise it as a valuable tool to raise voter turnout and elect candidates who align with 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 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.”

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To be clear, there has been no evidence of widespread fraud in any state related to mail voting. Some isolated cases of potential fraud involving ballot collections have been caught and prosecuted.

Tyler’s comments reflect a dramatic change of course for conservatives, some of whom amplified rumors about mail ballots to explain Donald Trump’s 2020 loss. Republican leaders see it as necessary if they are to be competitive in an election this year that is likely to decided by thin margins in a few swing states.

Trump has long criticized this voting method as rife with fraud — an unfounded assertion. Now he and other top GOP officials are encouraging voters to cast their ballots by mail. The party has launched an effort to “correct the narrative” on mail voting to coax those who were turned off to it by Trump to reconsider for this year’s election.

The practice of ballot gathering – where individuals chosen by voters return mail-in ballots on their behalf – is legal in 35 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Rules vary, but in California, where there is no limit on how many ballots a single person can collect, a collector cannot be compensated and must turn in the ballot in person or by mail within three days of receiving it, or before polls close on Election Day.

Training churches to gather ballots

Gina Gleason, executive director of California-based Real Impact, a ministry of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, said she saw how Southern California Democrats used this strategy to get their congressional candidate elected by a narrow margin in 2018. In 2020, her church began collecting ballots every Sunday in the weeks before Election Day.

“Voters handed their signed and sealed ballots to us,” she said. “We placed them in lock boxes and personally turned them over to the county 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 were from church members and their families, some were from members of other churches who drove to Chino Hills to submit their ballots.

“This is the kind of impact we’re looking for that can flip school boards and make a difference in our communities by changing laws we don’t want to live under,” she said, citing a law signed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom to prevent schools from outing transgender and gay students to their parents. “We don’t want the government telling us what we can or cannot do when it comes to the health and safety of our children.”

When she trains church volunteers, Gleason includes key instructions, like making sure the outside 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 electioneering or telling people whom 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 the one in Menifee. She and Pastor Jack Hibbs, who leads her church, have been traveling the state on their “Comeback California Tour” with the goal of “getting Christians energized and engaged.”

Conservative groups hope these initiatives will proliferate in other states. Timothy Head, executive director of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, a conservative political advocacy nonprofit, said ballot gathering is gaining traction among once reluctant churches in competitive states such as Nevada and Virginia. He calls it the “crawl, walk, run effect.”

“We expect it to significantly increase this time. … Every vote counts and every effort to maximize votes counts.”

Plus, churches are natural choices, he said.

“Congregations gather at least once or twice a week. As long as they are not explicitly partisan, it is a great place where voters can 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 devout believer and an atheist have the same rights.”

He ended his discourse by telling his audience that Trump may have gotten a “little wiggly and wobbly on abortion,” and told them to “forget (Trump’s) rhetoric and shenanigans, the crazy and off-color talk.”

“Fewer children will die under Donald Trump than under Kamala Harris,” he said, referring to abortions. “So that’s how I’ll be voting.”

The audience burst into applause. One man yelled out: “Yeah, Trump.”

The issue of trust

Richard Hasen, who leads the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law, said he is not aware of credible allegations of fraud involving ballot gathering. He would still prefer that states set limits on the number of ballots that can be collected.

“It’s low-risk, but not no-risk, and the fact we haven’t seen major problems is a good sign,” he said. “Still, any time people get together to vote, you want to make sure they are making free and fair choices – whether that place is a church, nursing home or union hall.”

Former Orange County Registrar Neal Kelley believes ballot gathering can help increase voting, but has not made a big dent on elections so far. He also is not too worried about ballot tampering, which is one concern critics have raised in the past regarding this practice.

“The general public doesn’t understand all the ways we have to determine that ballots have been tampered with,” he said. “We can tell when envelopes have been opened and resealed. If votes are being changed, we’ll see a pattern.”

Ada Briceno, chairperson of the Orange County Democratic Party, said ballot gathering allows more people to vote, especially in communities of color where people are working two or three jobs or may struggle with language issues.

“We want more people to have their voices heard, and this is just one more tool,” she said. “Republicans were the ones who were all upset about turning in mail-in ballots. And now they’re doing 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 gathering ballots.

“If other community groups are doing it, why not churches?” he said. “I have no doubt that churches will make sure everything is done legally and correctly because they have a higher level of accountability and that moral compass of integrity — more so than any community group.”

Progressive groups have also trusted churches to get the vote out, said Juan Sepulveda, political science professor at Trinity University in San Antonio. Among the groups that pioneered such initiatives was the Industrial Areas Foundation, a national interfaith network established in 1940 by a community organizer, a Catholic bishop and the Chicago Sun-Times’ founder.

“With the church, you have those natural bonds of trust,” Sepulveda said. “You didn’t have to create trust. It was already there.”

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.