It’s Ne-VA-duh, Not Ne-VAH-duh
As the nation hold’s its breath waiting for the results of the election to come in, it’s clear that Nevada is going to play a pivotal role in deciding the Presidency this year. Nevada doesn’t necessarily take up major news headlines. The last time Clark County, Nevada garnered this much attention was when the Las Vegas Mayor, Carol Goodman, offered up her constituents in a hypothetical COVID-19 control experiment. However, the tables have turned—or shall I say, the dice have been rolled in our favor. As I’m writing this, the margin in Nevada between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is Joe Biden up by 7,647 votes. Razor thin.
Never in a million years would I have thought that my hometown would be the difference between two vastly different paths for the future of this nation, but here we are. In early October, I brought the ACTION Project (also known as Allied Community Engagement Together in Our Neighborhood) to Las Vegas in order to help engage a niche voting bloc—the Muslim vote. The ACTION Project is built around the notion that minority communities are less likely to vote, with voter registration being the primary barrier. ACTION Project set out to help the Las Vegas Muslim community at a place where its quite difficult to rebuke a helping hand, your local mosque.
Growing up in the Muslim community here you learn a few things. The first and most obvious thing is that we’re just not a monolith. Las Vegas Muslims are hugely diverse in age, zip codes, socioeconomic status, citizenship status, languages spoken, and race. There are Black Muslims, White Muslims, South Asians Muslims, Arabs Muslims, and so many more cultural groups, who often live in different parts of town and go to different mosques. This makes it extremely difficult to energize these groups all at once. Within all this diversity there is one theme tying these voters together—lack of political participation.
The lack of participation comes from many factors including unnecessarily complex election procedures, clerical issues with regards to voter registration, and most of all apathy. There was an overwhelming belief in the Muslim community post 9/11 that our voice didn’t matter, and that it was safer to stay silent. Out of sight, out of mind. But young Muslims do not ascribe to these ideals. We are scholars, we are entrepreneurs, we are leaders, and best of all, we too are Americans.
This is where the ACTION Project came in. I realized that in order to engage these voters we had to break down as many barriers to voter registration as possible. Due to the pandemic, we weren’t able to register voters directly but we came up with creative ways to give these potential voters the tools they would need in order to participate in the election process. My team and I set up a network of volunteers in every mosque in Las Vegas, working with each of these mosque’s unique communities, to pass out pamphlets telling people everything from “how to register online in 3 easy steps” to “common mistakes on mail ballots” to a calendar listing every date they needed to know for this election. The response was overwhelming. All in all, we personally sent these pamphlets to more than 250 voters from all over the city — many of whom were not registered at the time. Many of the people I talked to while I was volunteering were overjoyed at finding a helpful all-in-one resource, and were more enthusiastic to vote after reading the pamphlets. Not only were we able to engage these voters directly, but we were also able to spread this information over social media as well.
Now as the rest of the nation is anxiously watching the Presidential Election come down to a 7,647 vote margin that hinges on Las Vegas, I feel comfort in knowing that I was able to help mobilize my community. I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve done this year, and I know in my heart that it made a difference. To quote Biden, as well as every Muslim out there— “InshAllah.”
Author: Nishi Rahman is a third year student at UC Berkeley studying Public Health and Public Policy. He is deeply interested in the intersection between politics and healthcare, and hopes to someday help create a fairer, more affordable healthcare system for all Americans. When he’s not tweeting about mail-in ballots he enjoys playing the piano, drawing, and mountain biking.
