Sister Monica McGloin and Sister Mary Wendeln

​Sister Monica McGloin is a Dominican Sister of Hope, and Sister Mary Wendeln is a Sister of the Precious Blood. Both are active in Nuns on the Bus of Cincinnati and Ohio.

Three years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that critical protections provided by the Voting Rights Act had outlived their historic usefulness. It is not surprising that, in the wake of that decision, the right to vote is increasingly in peril across this nation – nowhere moreso than in Ohio. Freed from federal scrutiny, many states have rolled back past advances meant to increase voter participation and in quick succession have enacted aggressive anti-voter laws. These laws have not been limited to the historically segregationist Southern states that previously were subject to the strictest scrutiny by federal authorities. They also have proliferated in swing states like Ohio, where they have been portrayed as necessary to fight imagined in-person voter fraud. In reality, these laws serve to tamp down voter participation, especially among communities of color, young people, the elderly, those living in poverty and others on the margins.

Chief among the new tools for suppressing these voters in Ohio are the orchestrated purges of hundreds of thousands of Ohioans from the rolls of registered voters since Jon Husted became secretary of state, with hundreds of thousands more to be purged in the near future. Fighting back against these purges with voice and action is more important and urgent than ever. We as citizens cannot rely solely on the courts to reverse the effects of voter purges because protecting the right to vote is not merely a legal necessity – it is a moral imperative.

Our faith demands that we fight back on moral grounds against voter suppression tactics such as Husted’s purges, which have disproportionately disadvantaged the most vulnerable and marginalized in our society. Nuns on the Bus of Cincinnati, a gathering of Catholic sisters from numerous religious orders across our region, is getting back on the bus to educate the public about the voter purges and to urge thousands of potentially disenfranchised voters in our region to re-register now, so that they will not be surprised by being handed provisional ballots on Election Day – an emblem of second-class citizenship. As religious women, we feel impelled to these actions by Christ’s admonition to protect “the least” among us, and in that way we also believe that orchestrated maneuvers by election officials designed to make voting more difficult for these people are abhorrent to the teachings of Christ.

True faith, Pope Francis has said, is inseparable from involvement in the community. Our community initiative against the purges kicked off Tuesday morning, when we filled our bus again and rode to the Hamilton County Board of Elections at 824 Broadway, Downtown. At the board’s 8:30 a.m. meeting, we presented evidence of unwarranted voter purging here in Hamilton County. We will challenge the board to prevent further unwarranted purging by declaring a moratorium on the entire purging process in Hamilton County until state authorities can devise measures to ensure that those qualified and eligible to vote are no longer removed from the rolls without cause. Following Tuesday’s meeting, we are going into the community to stir up moral outrage against the voter purges, to warn those potentially affected that they must act to solidify their voting status before it is too late, and to harness that outrage and that urgency to propel a sustained re-registration drive in the community.