Matt Matthews, the co-pastor of the Waldensian Presbyterian Church, sent the following letter six days ago, Tuesday, March 3, to all the members of his congregation. Regardless of in what continent or country they live, members and friends of the American Waldensian Society will likely find this letter informative and touching.
Dear Friends,
Today is election day in Valdese. Go vote. Your vote counts. Your vote matters.
By the time this email is sent to you, Rachel and I, along with a few dozen other neighbors, will have been at the polls for nearly four hours serving as judges.
It will be a long day. While polls close at 7:30 tonight, poll workers will be staying late packing up computers, voting machines, bins of gear, and traffic cones. (Yes, each precinct has at least one traffic cone.) One of us will drive voting results to the Board of Elections office in Morganton as soon as the machine is locked down. Others of us will wait for a Board of Elections truck to come to our precinct to pick up our gear. We’ll lock the doors and turn out the lights at around 9 p.m.
When Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” he probably didn’t have voting in mind. But voting is, in fact, one way to love our neighbor. This is a form of care and responsibility, duty, and attentiveness.
Waldensian Presbyterian Church has been a good neighbor since the founding of our town. I’m grateful to be a part of this church, town, state, nation, and world.
I could get gushy. I’m surprised by how passionately I feel about voting now that I serve as a poll worker.
Several folk in our congregation have worked the polls over the years. My precinct’s chief judge from last election had worked the polls for over thirty years. My chief judge this year is a deacon at our church.
Rachel and I are newbies at working the polls. But my eyes tear up several times a day in this volunteer job, bearing witness to the parade of our neighbors coming to the polls, presenting their picture ID, and getting their ballot to fill in the circles of their candidates and causes.
This is a big deal.
Join me in praying for this process and for our country. Governance is hard work for everyone requiring a degree of sacrifice and elbow grease. Democracy is fragile, flawed, and beautiful. Our country and world need us.
See you at the polls.
PEACE,
MATT
The author, Matt Matthews, is pastor of the Waldensian Presbyterian Church in Valdese, North Carolina. Matt is pictured below with his wife, Rachel.
Moved by what Matt had to say, the team responsible for AWS communications spontaneously shared with each other their own experiences as poll workers or as the spouses or siblings of poll workers. One of the team’s members shared how many years ago he was a poll worker representing the Democrats. He accidentally miscounted the votes for president, giving the Republican candidate 40 extra votes. But then, the Republican poll worker, whose candidate had been incorrectly given 40 extra votes, intervened and said, however much he preferred his Democratic colleague’s vote totals, he could not allow that. All the poll workers laughed at how the arithmetic error was corrected. Ah, those were the days.
