At 7 a.m. on Monday, the line for the soup kitchen snaked through a hallway of St. Bartholomew’s Church in Midtown Manhattan as men and a few women, bundled in layers of worn jackets and sweatshirts, waited for a breakfast of mixed greens and egg noodles with beef donated by the nearby Waldorf Astoria.

On Tuesday, a handful of soup kitchen regulars will stand in lines at polling places around New York City to cast their votes in a Presidential contest where the struggles of poverty rarely made their way into the National debate.

But with the help of the League of Women Voters, volunteers with Crossroads Community Services, a nonprofit founded by the church, held voter registration drives in August and September. Homeless people are guaranteed the right to register to vote in New York despite not having fixed addresses as a result of a lawsuit argued by the Coalition for the Homeless in 1984.

As of Wednesday, there were 36,520 adults in City shelters overseen by the Department of Homeless Services. As a voting bloc, homeless adults could be powerful, but many are uninterested and overwhelmed. “They are living in crisis and dealing with a lot of immediate needs, and that may prohibit them from voting,” Giselle Routhier, Policy Director at the Coalition for the Homeless, said.

The organization distributed around 1,500 fliers in shelters for single adults last week, Ms. Routhier said. The flier says voting could influence Local and Federal Housing policies. “At all levels of government, these people have the power to impact your lives,” she said.











NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker