The voter vacuum

It is election season, and many voters are deliberating over the candidates who will appear on November ballots. For better or for worse, those elected in the coming days will become America’s newest wave of leaders.
Serious believers instinctively understand the call to be a student of Scripture, an active church member, a prayer warrior, a compassionate neighbor, and an informed voter. Some even recognize the duty to exercise their constitutional power by voting for the office of president or perhaps governor. But further down the ballot something disconcerting happens: Christian voters go silent. In the absence of guidance and trustworthy data, good-intentioned Americans abandon the down-ballot races, and that void makes room for poor leadership to rise.
New research exposes this gap.

The gap
The Barna Down-Ballot Report, a survey conducted between May and June of this year and published in September, was commissioned by AFA Action (afaaction.net) and iVoterGuide in conjunction with George Barna and the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University. It revealed that while 85% of likely Christian voters will pull the lever at the top of the ticket (primary and general elections), only 55% say they will definitely vote for offices further down the ballot.
This leaves school boards, district attorneys, and judges – offices that most impact daily life – up for grabs. Either they are left to chance, or they are influenced by activist groups with the strongest agendas. State by state, followers of Christ relinquish their chance to choose political leaders based on their values and inadvertently become silenced.
Here is one of the most striking statistics in the data set: Of likely voters, 36% say they lack credible or sufficient information to vote for school board candidates.
School board landed at the bottom of the entire research set – 10 points less likely to receive the Christian vote than any other office on the ballot. Bear in mind that school board member is the very office that comes closest to the kitchen table. School boards determine the curriculum, the books that make it onto library shelves, and the lessons American children are taught (and shown) in the classroom. Arguably, school boards play one of the most consequential roles in the community, yet research shows that Christians are overwhelmingly leaving this office blank on their ballots.

The goal
The problem is not apathy; it is the lack of trusted and well-researched information – data that goes beyond candidates’ rhetoric and reveals their track record, their sources of funding, and their stated beliefs about issues of greatest concern to biblical voters.
iVoterGuide works diligently and prayerfully to gather and distribute all this information for every address nationwide at no cost to the voter. Why? To equip Americans to vote wisely.
But such equipping involves more than just statistics,
strategy, and data. It also involves prayer.
This election season, cry out to the Most High and intercede for this nation, asking for Christians to be awakened and informed so they can vote according to their values.