Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified the city where Tejpaul Singh Bainiwal serves. He is a board member of the Stockton Gurdwara Sahib. Additionally, the surname of Nirmal Singh Chohla was misspelled.
In the cadence of a Sunday sermon, Hilliard Church Rev. William T. DeArmond Jr. shared his message about faith and its ties to civic responsibility.
But those gathered weren’t at church. As traffic moved along El Dorado Street, DeArmond’s voice echoed across Stockton’s old civic plaza.
“We believe something simple, but powerful,” said DeArmond, a pastor from the Hilliard Church AME Zion Church. “Voting is sacred because people are sacred.”
Gathered near the statue of Martin Luther King Jr. at the edge of Stockton’s namesake plaza, faith leaders from across San Joaquin County Tuesday came together to share a message of faith and civic responsibility ahead of November’s general election.
The gathering was one of four other news conferences held across the Central Valley, organized by Faith in the Valley, a multifaith grassroots organization.
Patrice MucCular was among dozens of faith leaders from across the county at the event. A senior pastor at New Covenant Tabernacle in Lodi, MucCular said she believes voting is one way people can make their voice heard, especially at a time when she described the county as being in “chaos.”
“We have a voice in our own churches, but we also have a voice in the community if we speak loud enough,” said MucCular, 78. “While we have the opportunity, we need to do whatever we can to make sure our voices are heard and that people everywhere can hear it, no matter what their voting choices are.”
At the news conference, Faith in the Valley revealed its new Poll Chaplain program. Catholic clergy and other multifaith leaders, organizer Evan Wade explained, will help promote a peaceful environment for voters and poll workers on Election Day.
The new program comes as election officials and voters across the country continue to face concerns about safety and harassment at polling places. In a 2022 federal case in Texas, Black voters alleged that white poll workers repeatedly singled them out, aggressively asking them to recite their addresses — a practice they said was not asked of white voters.
A recent survey from the Brennan Center For Justice also found that 32% of election officials they surveyed reported experiencing threats, harassment and abuse because of their work. A separate 2024 poll found those experiences were more common among elections officials in counties where the majority of residents were Hispanic or people of color.
Before speakers took the podium, Tia Barnes, one of the event’s organizers, showed those in attendance a mason jar filled with bright jellybeans. Referencing a Jim Crow-era test used to suppress Black voters, Barnes explained that it was a test in which election officials would ask Black Americans to guess the approximate number of beans in the jar in order to vote.
“Something as small as this jar stops you from being able to say what you can and cannot do in your neighborhood and what laws govern you,” said Barnes, addressing the crowd of mostly Black faith leaders. “We have come a long way.”
It’s a legacy of fighting for the rights of Black people that Bertha Jackson echoed. The first fight she described to the crowd was the Birmingham bus boycott, where the city came together to demand that Black people be able to sit where they wanted on the bus.
Then came organizing at the 16th Street Baptist Church, where civil rights meetings and rallies were planned, she said. But it was also where racist violence struck. In 1963, a bombing of the church killed four Black girls and injured more than 20 people. Jackson said all four girls were her classmates.
It’s because of that history, she said, that the fight cannot stop.
“The problem now is that we have to use our voice to vote. We have to come out. We need to stand for the rights that was given to us,” said Jackson, president of Ministers and Community United in Stockton.
The event also gave Olivia Hale, the Registrar of Voters for San Joaquin County, a chance to answer questions from faith leaders about how ballots are counted and certified. According to Hale, over 158 polling locations exist throughout the county, with 27 ballot drop boxes and more than 1,200 poll workers to service the county’s approximately 457,000 registered voters.
“Elections should not be a mystery,” Hale said. “We want residents to understand what happens to their ballot after they cast it.”
One of the last speeches from the faith leaders came from Tejpaul Singh Bainiwal, who started his speech in Punjabi. Historian Singh Bainiwal, a board member of the Stockton Gurdwara Sahib, told Stocktonia he opened in that language so elders and immigrants in his community could understand.
In his remarks, Bainiwal pointed to the experiences of Nirmal Singh Chohla and Amritpal Singh, two members of the Sikh faith whom he described as having been persecuted by the Indian government for their activism.
Here, he said, where Sikh immigrants came together to build the Stockton Gurdwara — the first one to serve Sikhs in the US and Canada — they found their voice.
“They fled a nation where you could not speak truth to power,” Bainiwal said. “But here, the truth to power comes through our vote.”
For more information on where to vote, important election dates, and who and what is on the ballot, read Stocktonia’s 2026 voter guide.