Adam Phillips is joined by Jennifer Roberts, former mayor of Charlotte, who shares about her experience touring North Carolina to build trust in a free, fair, and safe election, and the lessons she learned about political polarization during her time in Northern Ireland.
On this episode of Faith in Elections, Adam Phillips talks with Jennifer Roberts, former mayor of Charlotte and advocate for trusted elections. Roberts discusses her work with the North Carolina Network for Free, Fair, and Safe Elections. She emphasizes the importance of building trust, promoting community engagement, and combating misinformation. Roberts also shares insights from a recent trip to Northern Ireland, where she learned about the role of faith communities in peacebuilding during "The Troubles." Drawing parallels to U.S. political polarization, she advocates for faith leaders to encourage peaceful civic engagement and underscores the critical role of accurate information and community involvement in upholding democracy.
Guest Bio: Jennifer Roberts, former Mayor of Charlotte, co-leads the North Carolina Network for Free, Fair, and Safe Elections alongside former NC Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr. This cross-partisan initiative, supported by The Carter Center, is dedicated to fostering peaceful political engagement and bolstering confidence in the electoral process. Before her mayoral term, Roberts served four terms as a Mecklenburg County Commissioner and later led the Communities Program on Climate Solutions for ecoAmerica, a national nonprofit. She remains a dedicated advocate for education, equality, inclusion, and environmental protection.
Roberts’ diverse background includes experience as a high school math teacher and a diplomat for the U.S. State Department, with postings in the Dominican Republic and Mexico. She holds advanced degrees from the University of Toronto and the Johns Hopkins School of International Affairs. Her leadership has earned her numerous accolades, including the Maya Angelou Women Who Lead Award and Equality North Carolina’s Ally of the Year.
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[00:00:02] Adam Phillips: Here in Chicago, we take great pride in where we live, take great pride in our neighborhoods, whether they're on the north side or the south side, the west side too, of course, but there's not a baseball team there. I live in the north side with my family. We're Cubs fans. Of course, we took our son to a ball game down on the south side and saw the Sox this past season. The rivalry isn't that deep in our house.
I do have to admit, when I go to Wrigley, it sometimes feels like church. I love passing on the story of the ball club to my seven-year-old. Pass on the colors, pass on the history and the culture, the teamwork of these storied ball clubs. It gets me thinking about what happens when colors become more symbols of divisiveness. Thinking about Bosnia and Herzegovina, thinking about Kigali, Rwanda, where colors of identity and tribalism devolved into heinous violence. Of course, the troubles in Northern Ireland, Belfast, Catholics and Protestants, orange and green, symbols of pride, but of course, at times, symbols of very, very violent tragedy and division.
When I think about far-off places, I'm also thinking about my neighborhood back home and how to be a bridge builder amidst the division of our times. With rampant divisiveness and mistrust in the current election cycle, we have to remember there are also people working to bring folks together and to rebuild trust. Our guest is doing just that. I'm Adam Phillips, Chief Strategy Officer and Chief of Staff at Interfaith America and co-host of Faith in Elections, a special pre-election series highlighting the work of people working tirelessly to build bridges across diverse communities and uphold free and fair elections in a season marked by chaos and division.
Jennifer Roberts is a community activist, former diplomat, and an Interfaith America Faith in Elections Playbook grantee with a deep commitment to strengthening democracy. She's also the former mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, and co-leads the North Carolina Network for Free, Fair, and Safe Elections, a cross-partisan initiative dedicated to promoting peaceful political engagement and election confidence, supported by the Carter Center.
Through her work with North Carolina Network for Free, Fair, and Safe Elections, she went to Ireland to learn about the religious and cultural divisions that led to decades of violence and brings us back lessons of healing that we can use right here at home. Jennifer, take us local first to North Carolina. What are you seeing in North Carolina in terms of democracy and just in general, what's happening in your home state?
[00:02:30] Jennifer Roberts: First, I want to say thanks for having me on your podcast and helping our country address these important questions. I also want to add, yes, North Carolina is a swing state, but every state is important and every vote is important. One of the things that we work on in democracy is helping people understand why their voice matters, how they can have influence on their governance, on what our future looks like, what the world is going to look like for our children in every way, shape, and form, local, state, and federal.
I just want folks to know before I talk about what it's like to be in a swing state, that every vote is important and that's what makes a democracy function and makes it strong. Here in North Carolina, we went from leaning red to being a toss-up. What that means, because the way that we have self-segregated in states across the country is that we have some states that are heavily Republican, some states that are heavily Democratic, and those that have an equal mix of both, like North Carolina, are known as swing states.
We also find here that the largest pocket of voters are actually the unaffiliated voters. These are voters who are tired of the polarization and the two institutions who are in it for, win or take all kind of thing. If you get a super majority, you ignore the other side, which is not the way that democracy should work. What it's like to be here right now, there are a lot of events. We have a governor's race that's gotten national attention. We have a state superintendent of instruction that's gotten national attention.
Of course, we have had many visits from the presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle trying to speak to their voters and trying to increase enthusiasm. What we also see happening is as that enthusiasm increases, the energy increases, and sometimes the tendency to harass or call names or get a little aggressive in your enthusiasm, that is also increasing. This is something that we're concerned about in the country as a whole.
[00:04:56] Adam: I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the North Carolina Network for Fair, Safe, and Secure Elections. I know it's a cross-partisan initiative working for a more peaceful North Carolina. I'd love to hear more about it and what you all are doing.
[00:05:10] Jennifer: The Trust Elections Town Halls are about restoring trust and faith in our democratic institutions. We know that we are challenged right now because people don't know if that video online is real. They don't know if that's the real person saying it. There's so many ways to fake a video, to fake a voice, and there's a lot of curiosity. What we find in the town halls is you have the experts who are actually running your election system right there in front of you. They're not AI-generated.
They're real people. They're the ones who are actually counting the ballots and securing the ballots with lock and key every night, making sure they don't get hacked and making sure they're stored safely for 22 months and all that. You can ask them directly. There is still a benefit to meeting in person. As much as people love to do Zoom and listen to podcasts, there is still a lot about coming together. You see this in congregations. There's something about being in that sanctuary together and doing something together and seeing people in real life.
The election town halls are to try to get ahead of the bad information, manipulated information out there that people are using for political ends. They're trying to either get more enthusiasm among their voters or suppress the votes on the other side. All these hundreds, hundreds of election laws that have been passed since 2020 in, I don't know, 30 states across the United States, trying to either restore trust or to suppress votes or do both at the same time, because it depends on your viewpoint as to how you see it. One of the things in North Carolina we have is we have a new law that requires you to show photo identification when you go to vote.
Haven't done that for decades. All of a sudden we're doing it. It's because people are worried that there are people using fake names and fake social security numbers and fake addresses and voting. It's actually, that's not true because the voter rolls are very carefully maintained. Every week they're updated. They get death certificates. They get information about who's moved. People who've been incarcerated. If they're serving a sentence, they can't vote. All these things are updated some places every day, depend on the county and the resources.
When you hear that from the actual election director doing it, you have a little more confidence. Rumors are so easy to spread. We want people to have good information first. Then when they hear the rumor, they might just think, that doesn't sound like it's quite right. Let me go to the state website, the .gov, which has extra security measures on it that are going to make sure it can't be hacked. Let me go and see what the real story is. We try to give folks the resources that they can trust, the ways to ask questions if something sounds fishy, and realize that voting is the essence of democracy.
If you don't trust that your vote actually helped elect one of your candidates who ends up winning, if you don't feel like that vote went through, if you don't feel like it's ever going to go through and you just sit back and don't do anything, that is not helping democracy work well. Democracy works best when more voices are heard. You get less extreme candidates. You get better candidates.
You get more people watching the election. When one side that's distrustful says we need observers to watch, well, engage, go sign up, be a poll worker, go sign up to be a poll watcher, go help a nonpartisan group stand out in the front and help people who are in the wrong place. There are all kinds of ways to get engaged. One of my favorite taglines is democracy is not a spectator sport.
[00:08:58] Adam: I lived in Oregon for a number of years. It's a vote-by-mail state. It was great. It worked so well. There's so much misinformation, maybe even disinformation around the ballot and then, of course, results that folks might not see going their way. I'm wondering, how can we help people feel good about the results, even if it's not the outcome they want, but know that there was integrity to them?
[00:09:20] Jennifer: I'm so glad you asked this question because it is after the election that we're going to have to do the most work. That is because of the distrust. It's because one side, the side that loses, is going to find it to their benefit to say, well, there must be fraud. We had a local election director here in North Carolina at one of our town halls, say-- He told a story. He's a staff person. He's just counting the votes. He just wants the right number to come out, doesn't care who wins, as long as it's correct. He said a friend of his who lost kept calling and saying, "I can't. understand it. Everybody I talked to said they were going to vote for me. [laughter] How could I lose?"
It's like, "Well, you didn't talk to every single voter in the county, did you?" It's human nature. It's natural to think, "Oh my gosh, I'm so great. How could I have lost?" What we want to do after November the 5th, there are several things that I hope people will do. First of all, be patient because not only are there more votes coming in after Election Day, there are provisional ballots here in North Carolina, there are absentee ballots, military ballots can come in up to nine days after Election Day, overseas ballots, and that's not just military, it's also, if you're working for a company and living in France, but you're voting here, those can come in later. Be patient.
November the 5th is not the final result. It is an indication, but things can change. The second thing is there are going to be lawsuits. We know this already. People are telling us ahead of time that they're not going to trust it. They're going to file a lawsuit. That's okay. There's a legal way to challenge votes. There's a legal way to challenge voters. There's a legal way to challenge a campaign. Follow the rule of law. That's what made our country great, that we are a country of laws that apply to everybody. Again, be patient. Watch what's going on, listen to it, but don't go pound on the election window with a hammer because you're upset. Be patient.
The faith community can play a really good role in that, being peacekeepers, helping people understand this is not election day, it's election season. We're actually in Charlotte. We're having conversations with interfaith groups about how do we message that? How do we do that without being political, without being partisan? Democracy to me is an area that just like major faith tradition says that everybody should have a voice. Every person is valuable. Every vote should be counted, and everybody should be treated equally.
I was reminded, there's an attorney working with me on this town hall tour, Bob Orr, who keeps reminding us of the history. This will be the 60th time that this nation has come together to vote for its president. We voted during World War I. We voted during World War II. We voted during the Great Depression. We voted during COVID. We as a country have continued to vote through all those challenges. We're going to vote this time. We have to accept that they're going to be losers. It doesn't necessarily mean that they were bad. It just means they didn't get the most votes.
We have to accept the system. I always tell folks, it's like football, the great American metaphor. When you've lost, you walk off the field and you look for the next season. That's what you have to do with elections as well. Your candidate loses, you have your little grief and you worry and all that. Then you start working on the next election.
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[00:13:16] Adam: We'll be back with Jennifer Roberts after a short break. During the summer of 2024, Jennifer Roberts joined a group of 25 faith and community leaders on a trip to Northern Ireland to examine the lasting impact of the Troubles, a 30-year conflict marked by political violence. Sponsored by the Carter Center and Rethinking Conflict, this visit provided Jennifer with an intimate understanding of the ongoing trauma and the role that peace agreements, like the Good Friday Agreement, played in healing a deeply divided society.
Because of the key parallels between the conflict in Northern Ireland and the growing political polarization in the US, I asked Jennifer to talk about the difference faith communities can make in encouraging trust in democracy and how peaceful civic engagement can prevent political violence in America.
[00:14:03] Jennifer: The visit to Northern Ireland was fascinating. Let me give a little background of how we got there. I've been doing work with the Carter Center for the last four years on democracy, supporting democracy, trying to help depolarize our communities, recognizing the strength and that diversity, and supporting the peaceful transfer of power. Learning how to disagree in an agreeable way and come together for solutions instead of saying, the other side is all wrong, I'm not listening to them, how do we work together?
Part of the Carter Center's work in the United States is based on faith outreach and knowing how important the faith community is as trusted messengers, as people who bring folks together around moral issues. Every major faith is love your neighbor, working peacefully together. How do we activate that faith community to also be a voice in these troubled election times, in this troubled democracy, in this increasing polarization? There's a minister in Belfast, Gary Mason, who has worked with the Carter Center for a number of years.
He was part of the faith leaders who helped with the peace process there. Northern Ireland had actually more than 30 years, but they had many years of conflict, but 30 years of killing and bombings and terrorism. They call this the Troubles. 30 years up until 1996, they had over 4,000 people killed. This is a small country, one and a half million people. If you looked at it compared to the United States, it would be hundreds of thousands of people killed, relative. It was a really terrifying time for that country.
Gary Mason invites groups of Americans to come and hear about the trauma, the lasting trauma that has brought to that country, to hear about lessons learned from those who were involved in the peace process, to hear from leaders from both sides, even former terrorists who now regret the actions they took, who recognize their thinking, the way they learned to dehumanize other folks, how the Protestants dehumanize the Catholics, how the Catholics dehumanize the Protestants.
It's not just the religious divide. It's also a cultural and identity divide because you had people who were pro-Britain and people who are pro-Ireland and how you were brought up and what neighborhood you were brought up in and what school you went to. The schools are still largely divided, Catholic schools and Protestant schools. They're working on that. Again, it's a process, and it's been 20-something years since the peace accords, and they're still working on it. The trauma is still very raw.
We heard from victims who had lost loved ones to stabbings, to terrorist bombs, lost their child, their wife, their son. 30 years later, they still break down to tears. We saw the lasting impact. What we heard from leaders there is please don't devolve into this in the United States because it takes a long time to heal. Several things we learned that we tried to bring back. One is, and they said this over and over, the church was silent. The Catholic church, the Protestant church, they did not speak out enough against the violence soon enough.
Now, eventually, they did. Eventually, they were part of the peacemaking process. Eventually, they figured out we got to bring people together. Not fast enough, not soon enough. One of the learnings we brought back is, you need to stand up. You need to speak out against violence, whatever form it takes. No matter how just the cause, violence is not the answer. The other thing that we learned, this is really interesting. We were like, "What was the tipping point? Where did you start to really realize?" Most of the terrorists were men. There were some women, but there were mostly men and the people carrying out the killings and the bombings.
They said, "Our wives got tired of it. Our wives put their foot down and said, 'I don't want to keep sending my son to school not knowing if he's going to come home. I don't want you to keep going to work not knowing if you're going to be targeted because you happen to be on one side or the other.'" There is still, I don't know, it's a 30-foot or 40-foot wall in the city between the Catholic and the Protestant parts of town. There are still taxi drivers, we spoke to them, who are Catholic, who are afraid when they have to drop people off in the Protestant part of town.
There are not the same number of killings now. There is a whole agreement. There's power-sharing and the legislative building, but the pain is still there. The feelings are still raw. As Gary Mason brings more and more people from the US over to see that, to feel that, to hear that, we were there for six days. That message is very powerful.
[00:19:25] Adam: Yes. I'm wondering if we could go a little bit deeper on that. You mentioned earlier how the churches were silent during the Troubles, and you've talked about the role of faith and community leaders. For us at Interfaith America, at least, we know that our freedoms depend on free and fair elections and that communities of faith play a critical role in defending them. I'm wondering if you can speak to the role of faith institutions and when and how they might step up here in America in these divisive times.
[00:19:54] Jennifer: Absolutely. I believe the faith community has a very big role they can play. This is not just Christian leaders, Muslim and Hindu, Jewish leaders. Every major faith tradition is about valuing the dignity of every person and respecting people, treating them with civility and not demeaning and dehumanizing, loving your neighbor. Now I always tell people, I haven't gotten to maybe where I don't love my enemy or my neighbor, but I don't hate them anymore. [laughs] We're all getting there. We're all becoming.
[00:20:29] Adam: We're all works in progress.
[00:20:29] Jennifer: We know we're supposed to be accepting and listening and including. I do think faith leaders have a role to play. What we find today because politics are so divisive, that many leaders are afraid to mention anything political. I've heard faith leaders say this, "I lost half my congregation when I mentioned that they should vote and that health care should be easily accessible and said something else that people thought was political, and so people walked out."
They're afraid to mention that, but I like what Senator Warnock said that a vote is like a prayer for the future we want to see. That's exactly what it is. You are hoping for a better future. You are saying a prayer for a better future. The folks in Northern Ireland said they were sad that the church did not speak up against violence. Can't we all agree that violence is wrong? Can't we all agree that if you have a disagreement with your neighbor, you don't go get a baseball bat and hit him over the head. Can't we all agree that you don't shame somebody because they don't have the wherewithal to cut their grass?
Why don't you go offer to cut their grass. Some of these things that seems simple when you start thinking of anecdotes, but in the political arena, there are some really tough questions, but we should not exclude people from our community because they don't agree with us. There are going to be those instances. We've got to learn to have more grace in understanding and accepting them.
[00:22:14] Adam: That's right. As someone that's worked in campaigns, who's served in a presidential administration, who's been a pastor too, I know that certainly elections have consequences. Democracy is not a zero-sum game. It should be an all-inclusive effort. Just so much of what you're saying about the Trusted Election Tour is just so aligned with our Faith in Elections Playbook. We're delighted you're one of our partners in that effort. The Faith in Elections Playbook supports faith-based, civic, and campus communities with accessible, actionable resources to support the 2024 election.
The playbook is designed to make it easier for faith and community leaders to join work that is already happening across America to help the elections run smoothly, but also what happens after November 5th, as you said, the election season. We have that go all the way to high noon on January 20th, Inauguration Day, when it comes to the presidential race. We know that there are so many elections happening down ballot as well. Any final thoughts on strategies to de-escalate, to seek peaceful civic engagement in that interim season between November 5th and January 20th?
[00:23:23] Jennifer: What I will tell folks is, if you're severely depressed after the election, be in community. Go to your church, go work with a food bank, help people eat. Do something positive, go clean up the stream with litter. Sign on to something to do something positive so you don't feel like everything has been wasted, so you see there's still good work going on. People are still trying to help build a better tomorrow. Don't sit and brood and watch either Fox or MSNBC all day.
This is the other challenge we have. I've been in so many houses where the TV is on all the time. I don't know how they do it. Don't have the TV on all the time. I went to a campaign event for a candidate, and he said, let me tell you, my advice to you is don't turn on Fox and MSNBC for the next month [laughs] and you're going to be a lot happier and you're still going to get the news. What you've got to realize is that these stations, just like social media sites, they're making money off of how much you watch and how many times you click.
They are incented to make it sound horrible and apocalyptic because you click on it, they get money from advertisers. Don't be sucked into that. Find your community, talk to people. If you're hurt after the election, talk to people who are like-minded, share that grief, talk about what you can do to get past it. Don't be isolated. If you won, win graciously. Don't start to call the other side names and say they were stupid and look, you didn't win because you were stupid or do anything. That is name-calling. Be a gracious winner.
I learned this in competitive sports as well. You shake the hand. You say good game. You call out the things they did great. You call out the things that you agree on and you say, now we're going to go and be in a community together because nobody's going away. Nobody is flying off in a capsule to the moon and disappearing forever. We're still here. We're still living together. I would tell the faith leaders to share that message. Think about activities you can have your congregation do during that difficult period, do a street cleanup or a park cleanup or something where people can be in community and do something because I think that's going to help us all get through.
Anybody who is a counselor, mediator, be free to share your skills widely. [laughs] We need all those folks to be very active and to be ready. If there's any kind of an incident, be ready to send out a message, to call a meeting, to join a prayer group, whatever it is that is going to going to help people be together and recognize that this too shall pass.
[00:26:10] Adam: Turn off the TV, don't doom scroll, maybe do a little grief work, call a friend, but be useful, be a neighbor, lean in in the neighborhood. We often talk at Interfaith America that diversity is a treasure and that our faith can be a bridge. That's what the Faith in Elections Playbook is all about. I want to encourage folks to check out interfaithamerica.org. We've got a really incredible video actually of two governors, Republican Governor Spencer Cox and Democratic Governor Wes Moore, who stand united in their commitment to free and fair elections. They're coming at it from different faith convictions and different parties, but they're one message and one mind there.
We're so delighted that you're a partner of our Faith in Elections Playbook. Jennifer, thank you so much.
[00:26:51] Jennifer: Thanks for having me. It's a great playbook.
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[00:26:55] Adam: I'm walking away from this conversation with a real sense of hope. Things feel divided in this country. People are flying red or blue, but we don't have to devolve into our own troubles. We can learn the lessons of Belfast, and we can work towards a better democracy right here at home. I'm really encouraged about how to show up, not just before the election, not just on election day, but after the election, to take this conversation with me in my own community. What I really loved about this conversation was how Jennifer talked about the importance of how faith leaders can show up, not just clergy, of course, clergy matter, but how do those of us in the pew show up as well?
How do we truly be inclusive and fight for this democracy that's worth fighting for? Thank you again, former mayor of Charlotte, advocate with North Carolina Network for Free, Fair and Safe Elections, and Interfaith America Faith and Elections Playbook grantee, Jennifer Roberts. We'd love to hear from you. Leave us a review and follow us on Instagram at Interfaith America. To read more about this conversation and find resources and stories about bridge building in a religiously diverse nation, visit our website, interfaithamerica.org.
Faith and Elections is part of our Voices of Interfaith America podcast network. This episode was hosted by me, Adam Phillips. Production was provided by Keisha "TK" Dutes, our executive producer. Manny Faces is our producer and audio editor for Philo's Future Media, a story editing by Johanna Zorn. The Interfaith America team is Silma Suba and Rheya Spigner, our executive producers. Noah Silverman is our editorial director and our Democracy Initiatives team is senior director Becca Hartman-Pickerill and manager Rollie Olson. We couldn't do this without our coordinated producers, Teri Simon and Olivia Stufflebeam, Rachel Crowe, our production assistant, and Katherine O'Brien, our marketing manager. Share Faith in Elections with a friend and rate, follow, subscribe wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
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