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KANSAS CITY, MO (KCTV KSMO ) — Just days before Election Day, a Kansas City community group is getting creative about how to get people to the polls in a pandemic.
Churches have long played a key role in providing rides to the polls.
“Getting souls to the polls” is what Danise Hartsfield calls it.
Hartsfield is the interim executive direction of Communities Creating Opportunity, also known as CCO, a nonprofit focused on racial justice and social change.
“Get out the vote, taking folks to the polls is tried and true,” Hartsfield notes.
But once COVID-19 took hold on the nation, she realized she would have to work on a new way to do that.
Pastors at some of the churches her multi-faith group works with told her they were uncomfortable loading up church vans or buses to provide those rides like they used to.
“Making sure individuals are socially distanced in the vans is problematic,” she explained.
Enter an app called Election Riders: a free Uber of sorts, created just for CCO, to provide rides individually in volunteers’ cars.
Hartsfield walked KCTV5 through a beta version of the app. The first step is to select a zip code. There are only five options. That’s because the program is for what CCO calls its focused communities.
“They have been identified as low life expectancy zip codes,” she said of the five zip codes.
They are 64109, 64127, 64128, 64130 and 64132.
The next step involves entering enter your phone number. A security code is sent to your phone to confirm you are the person requesting the ride. The driver then gets the same code to be sure they are picking up the right passenger. That phone number also helps later, for contact tracing should someone involved test positive. Once you get to the booking dashboard, you’ll be asked to send a photo of your ID as well, another security measure.
The Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church will be providing its parking lot as a check-in station for the 50-plus prescreened drivers in their personal cars.
“What we will do is we will check their license again, their tags, and their insurance,” Hartsfield explained.
They’ll get a PPE kit for them and their passengers, a window placard and magnetic signs for each side of the car to identify them as Election Riders.
The drivers have been trained in the organization’s COVID-19 protocols. Drivers are told to keep their passenger window rolled down for ventilation. They must wear masks and require passengers to do so. They must disinfect surfaces like seats and door handles between each trip. They are allowing only two passengers from the same household per vehicle and they must sit only in the back seat.
“We have three 5-hour shifts. We begin at 5:30 and we’re going to conclude at 7:30,” said Hartsfield of the long day.
She said CCO has been successful in getting many voters in their focused communities to utilize absentee and mail-in voting to avoid the potential health safety risk of crowds on Election Day.
This, she said, is the final piece, which was months in the making. As recently as a week ago, she said, she was stressed, worried about how effective her effort to find a creative solution would be.
“To see it come together and look like it’s going to come to fruition, I think it’s going to be good,” she said Thursday, breaking into a grin.”
The app doesn’t launch until November 1st.
Search Election Riders in your smartphone’s app store.
You can also schedule a ride the old-fashioned way by calling 816-221-0556.
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