The following is an interview with Michael Mehrazar, executive director at UUJusticePA. UUJusticePA is helping turnout Pennsylvania voters ahead of Election Day and will serve as monitors during the post-election canvassing of the vote. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
My name is Michael Mehrazar. I’m the executive director of UUJusticePA. We serve as the social justice advocacy voice for Unitarian Universalists throughout Pennsylvania.
Why did you decide to volunteer to help ensure an accurate vote count in Pennsylvania?
For Unitarian Universalists, democracy is built into our faith; the day-to-day running of our congregations are very much held on a democratic basis. But even beyond that, our fundamental shared beliefs as Unitarian Universalists include things like interdependence, diversity, and justice, which we interpret to mean democracy. So getting everyone actively involved in the political process is something that is really instrumental to us. This has been illustrated through a program that we’ve had as Unitarian Universalists nationally called UU the Vote, which again is focused on making real democracy, which throughout history has always fallen short and excluded people year in, year out, not just during election years.
I’ll just add that for us at UUJusticePA, we recognize that with various threats facing our electoral processes, it calls for particular focus to our work. These threats range from ways to disrupt mail ballots, interfere with Election Day, even calls to not certify election results after they’ve gone through all the processes. And we take these threats very seriously at UUJusticePA. We’ve seen in recent years what can happen when those anti-democratic forces are not adequately challenged, and so we started up our Democracy Defenders program where we invited our members to partner with groups in various ways, including the ACLU of Pennsylvania and many others, to get out the vote, to remind folks of their election rights, and getting clergy involved for Election Day protection. We think that it’s fundamental to our purpose as an organization representing Unitarian Universalists, and so that’s why we’re involved in this year’s election.
Why do you think it’s important that people get involved in civic engagement beyond simply voting on Election Day?
Oftentimes folks think voting is their entire civic duty and they can kind of tune out politics in between elections. But we’ve seen throughout history that when people tune out those that are engaged and have power come in and shape policies that can sometimes undo the very change people were trying to achieve by voting on Election Day. And so we strongly, again, as part of our faith principles, believe that democracy is a day-in, day-out, 365-day-a-year process. And while voting is certainly an important part of that, it is not the whole story. It’s just the beginning, not the end of our actions.
Throughout the year, we engage folks in various ways: meeting with their state legislators, making connections with staff and with the elected officials themselves, participating in public town halls, writing letters to the editor, and communicating information and taking action. We think that when people shrink away from involvement, then the power shrinks in terms of who actually has control. When people get more and more involved, then our democracy gets strengthened. So that’s why we strongly believe in focusing on the election right now, both getting out the vote and protecting it, but beyond Election Day, we’re super involved. The work doesn’t end on November 3rd.
What issues motivate you most to take action?
The way our model works at UUJusticePA is that we have six different justice teams that identify the policy issues that we feel most fit in line with our Unitarian Universalist values. Those six justice teams are: criminal justice, economic justice, environmental justice, LGBTQIA+ justice, good government, and reproductive justice.
We’re focused on equality and making sure that the benefits of society go to all, and that doesn’t just include simple wealth distribution. It’s making sure that there are no environmental justice dead zones. That criminal justice doesn’t target some communities more than others. That trans folks or others are not scapegoats for society’s problems. It’s about making sure there is genuine equality for every Pennsylvanian.
And finally, I’ll just say that even though we’re a religious faith organization, science, critical thinking, and reality-based understanding of the world is really crucial to our policy choices. In an era where misinformation and disinformation is growing ever more prevalent, we strongly believe that we have to push back against that. So, the three big issues, without getting super specific, are freedom, equality, and science literacy.
What would you say to those who feel like the political system is broken and that it’s not worth getting involved?
I would say I definitely hear you. There’s a lot in our current system that is broken, that is not working for the majority of people as it should. But I would encourage those people to ask what sort of people, what sort of special interests, what sort of factions want you to feel discouraged and not to want to act? And what might be the reasons for that?
You know, throughout history, we’ve seen a struggle for the right to vote – from everything we hopefully learned in school, like the civil rights movement and prior to that poll taxes and Jim Crow laws to the rights for women to vote, who were so long disallowed. Even young folks, people that were 18, 19, 20 years old could go fight in a war that they had no ability to vote for.
Voting is powerful and that’s why we see so much effort to dilute people’s vote, whether through gerrymandering or through massive amounts of money spent to influence voters. If it wasn’t important, there wouldn’t be that effort to prevent people from voting. So, again, voting is a first step. It’s not the whole aspect. In order to change our society, we need large numbers of people to spend some of their time in their very busy days to try to improve the world, and cynicism just allows folks to retreat from the public sphere, then allows those with power to have even more power. So, that’s what I would say to folks that are skeptical or cynical about getting involved.
These are difficult times. What gives you hope?
It’s a great question because in some ways, it is very difficult to see hope, but I think there’s two things I’d point out. First, when you look back at history, there’s a lot of times which looked hopeless, and folks, through perseverance, were able to get through it, which I think gives some hope. We’ve often seen through history times when disruptive technologies, particularly communicative technologies, totally disrupt a society and lead to long periods of upheaval. The example I think about is when the printing press first came on the scene and not long after that we had in Europe the Protestant Reformation which led, no doubt, to years of upheaval that wasn’t always happy to live through. But eventually, society did come to some ability of dealing with the printing press and figuring out ways of giving this new access to information while also having it be more controlled, perhaps contained.
I think we’ve seen, just in my lifetime and a little bit before, a similar process with the advent of the internet and everyday people having access to the internet at home. Smartphones, social media, and now generative AI are very disruptive technologies that we’ve seen have similar impacts. I think we’re also starting to see some of the ways of dealing with that. I’ve already seen in my personal life more and more folks using things like Signal to communicate, or Signal groups that aren’t as reliant on the social media algorithm or traditional media. It’s certainly not anywhere near perfect, but the ability to take some of the good from these tools and give folks the ability to communicate without privacy violations or algorithm manipulation, I think is really exciting and I think we can build off that. In my work, I’m very reliant on partners like the ACLU Pennsylvania, and seeing more and more of these intertwined relationships grow, that does give me hope.
Learn more about UUJusticePA.