By Karen Owen-Phelps, DisciplesWorld contributing writer

CHICAGO (11/25/08) — Three Disciples of Christ ministers were actively involved in a major effort to document immigrant participation in the recent presidential election. The effort dovetailed with their faith, one of the participants said.

“We believe in the need to empower communities that have been marginalized and the need to work with communities that are forgotten,” said April Lewton, who is a community organizer for the Asian American Institute, a non-profit, civil rights and advocacy agency.

The Institute joined with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights to conduct exit polls for 4,000 to 6,000 Chicago voters at 20 polling places Nov. 4.

Lewton, Jessica Vazquez Torres and Garry Sparks, all ordained in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), were among the hundreds of trained volunteers who surveyed voters or processed the data afterward.

The goal was to prove immigrants vote and show elected officials what immigrants are concerned about, Lewton said.

In a city so immersed in “machine” politics, voters’ views on local races was of even more interest than their take on the presidential race, Sparks said.

The volunteers also collected anecdotes about obstacles immigrants faced in different precincts, like the elderly Chinese woman who was turned away several times because she didn’t have “right” form of photo identification — even though one is not required in her state, Sparks said. ‘Behind the numbers are real people’s lives and real people’s stories.”

The survey was conducted in Spanish, Chinese and Urdu as well in English. “We did not discriminate against surveying non-immigrants or Caucasians,” but the goal was to find out who in the immigrant community was voting, why and who they voted for, Lewton said.

The economy, jobs, education and health care topped respondents’ list of concerns, she said.

Lewton also noted: "Even among the Caucasians and African American voters, there was a lot of support for immigration reform.”

That was surprising because “immigration was not an issue highly discussed on the campaign trail,” she said.

All three of the ministers involved in the project have been active in politics or community organizing before. Vazquez Torres is the Disciples' former anti-racism and reconciliation minister who works at McCormick Theological Seminary.

Sparks is working on his doctorate in theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is a former missionary to Guatemala for the Disciples of Christ and the United Church of Christ.

Lewton said she does advocacy work “because it relates to my belief in justice and my own faith. It’s because we support and acknowledge this as a justice issue, to recognize the struggle of immigrants, and the need to make their struggles known.”