Emily Fritz | a&e editor

Despite the necessity for separation between church and state, places of worship have held an integral role in how our government runs: as voting locations. In ye olden days, churches held more than one purpose, often serving as a school house, the place for prayer or the meeting spot for town halls.

Today, each of these purposes have been split into separate brick and mortar locations. Likewise, many others act as voting locations as well, including public buildings, K-12 schools, college or university campuses, fire stations, churches and senior living facilities, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In 2018, the 2022 Election Administration and Voting Survey report released by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission revealed that less than 1% of polling sites were election offices.

The requirements for a space to be an established voting location are pretty sparse; they must be large and empty enough to accommodate voters, as well as accessible and rent-free.

However, with the 501(c)(3), the tax-exempt status held by many churches, it is a requirement to keep the cross away from Congress. Or at least, in the sense that churches and other religious institutions must abstain from engaging in political campaigning and endorsement.

But this isn’t always the case in today’s polarized world, with reproductive rights on the ballot and concerns for marriage equality and gender-affirming healthcare not far behind.

For voters who have been assigned a religious institution as their voting venue, some may feel pressure to vote in a specific fashion or may be turned off from voting altogether.

It was determined in 1992 by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that this happenstance of geography could not be considered an infringement of First Amendment rights. As a result, objectors were encouraged to utilize mail-in and absentee voting.

This hasn’t stopped the discussion or the discomfort.

In 2020, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Maine Jordan LaBouff shared his findings on implicit social effects in The Conversation.

By including religious locations as polling places, LaBouff found that voters were subject to the “priming effect,” which operates in the same fashion as a leading question. Instead of casting their ballot as they would in a completely neutral site, like an election office, voters became swayed by their environment, oftentimes without recognizing that they had been influenced.

“In Arizona’s 2000 general election, citizens voting in schools were more likely to support a state sales tax increase to fund education than citizens with similar social and political characteristics who cast ballots elsewhere,” according to LaBouff.

“In a related laboratory study, voters shown images of a school encouraged support for education-oriented taxation, whereas images of a church reduced support for stem-cell research,” he continued.

LaBouff found that Christians who cast their ballots on their own religious turf tend to vote more conservatively than when voting in strictly secular locations.

So what does this mean for the greater population — the intermixed, interreligious, diverse crowd — which disagrees with itself on so many key policies? It means that we may just be inviting church into our state and federal government each time we allow a place of worship to continue as a voting location.

More specifically, we may be inviting people to restrict us to the ideals of their creed by allowing for these locations to continue offering their space. If the average voter is swayed by their environment, then it would stand to reason that outside of a biased polling location, they may vote differently, or secularly.

Now, encouraging voters of different beliefs to visit religious sites that they don’t align with may initially sound like a good thing. After all, if a voter is likely to experience more compassion for school children when voting in an elementary school, they could broaden their worldview when voting in a mosque or synagogue.

However, it’s more unlikely than you would think. Instead, when we cross-pollinate religious voters to other religious locations, we run the risk of inviting prejudice and hate into a sacred space that is integral to the personhood of someone.

If people are able to act on positive biases in biased voting locations, they can also act on negative biases the same way. In that scenario, it wouldn’t make sense to assign an antisemite or a devout Christian nationalist to a synagogue to cast their ballot, either.

“When a single mosque was included as a polling site among more than 50 churches in Palm Beach County, Florida, in 2016, the county’s election board received complaints and threats of violence until they removed the mosque as a polling site,” LaBouff writes.

On the flip side, LGBTQ+ voters — many of whom have experienced religious trauma — or irreligious voters may feel judged or unwelcome in a place where they are expected to self-advocate.

Voting should be something that reflects your best interests and the greater interests of the nation as a whole, and people with deeply held religious beliefs have every right to cast their ballot in a way that speaks to their own moral compass.

But casting your vote under the watchful eye of your god or anyone else’s should be something we are all relieved of. The implicit power of any partisan place should be removed from the equation.