Voter identification will be required in Missouri for the upcoming general election. But the faith community has concerns that marginalized groups are going to be left out of the voting process.
People can get ID cards from the DMV, but faith leaders are hoping to make them more widely accessible. In a meeting with Missouri's Secretary of State, Executive Director of Missouri Faith Voices Reverend Darryl Gray told Jay Ashcroft about how he hopes to expand access.
"We proposed to the Secretary of State that we would use other venues to help people get the voter ID cards," Gray said. "Community centers, churches, synagogues, that we would utilize libraries. And these recommendations seemed to be receptive."
However, it's less than four months until the November election -- when IDs will first be required -- and there are concerns regarding the amount of time it will take to process all these new IDs.
"We are behind, to be very candid," Gray said. "We understood that the Republican legislature around this country were going to bring up voter ID laws. If they had signed it a little earlier, we would've had another month."
But the law wasn't signed until recently, and Reverend Gray said that he and other advocates were holding out hope that the law wouldn't pass. But now that it did, they're getting to work.
"We will put our best foot forward to ensure that people from marginalized are not prevented from voting in the general election," he said.
Gray told KMOX that he and other faith leaders were up front with legislators about how they viewed voter ID laws.
"We made it very clear that we still see this law as a Jim Crow law. We see it as restrictive, we see it as complicated, we see it as chaotic, we see it as unnecessary," Gray said. "But if this law is going to exist, communities need to make sure that we do all that we can to make sure people are able to vote."
According to the National Conference of State Legislature, 35 states have some form of voter ID.