On a recent weekday afternoon, an Amish man in a horse-drawn buggy navigated through a busy intersection of auto traffic in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County, past a billboard proclaiming: “Pray for God’s Mercy for Our Nation.” The billboard featured a large image of a wide-brimmed straw hat often worn by the Amish. If there was any further doubt as to its target audience, the smaller print listed the sponsor as “Fer Die Amische” — referring to the Amish in their Pennsylvania German dialect. Researchers say most of the Amish don’t register to vote, reflective of the Christian movement’s historic separatism from mainstream society, just as they’ve maintained their dialect and horse-and-buggy transportation. But a small minority have voted, and the Amish are most numerous in the all-important swing state of Pennsylvania. So they’re being targeted this year in the latest of decades of efforts to register more of them to vote. Republicans are seeking their votes through billboards, ads, door-to-door canvassing and community meetings. Republican campaigners see the Amish as receptive to GOP talking points — smaller government, less regulation, religious freedom. “They just want government to stay not only out of their businesses but out of their religion,” said U.S. Rep. Lloyd Smucker, R-Pa., whose district includes Lancaster County, at the heart of the nation’s largest Amish population. Smucker, whose own family background is Amish, predicted a dramatic increase in the Amish vote, “basing that on the enthusiasm we see.” Most Amish don’t vote, but every vote matters in a swing state But while such efforts could yield an increase, don’t expect the Amish vote to dramatically swing the Keystone State’s bottom line, said Steven Nolt, director of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Lancaster County. “For most Amish history and in most Amish communities today, Amish people don’t vote,” he said. “They haven’t voted, they’re not voting, and I think it’s safe to say in the near future we wouldn’t expect them to.” But Amish in a handful of settlements in Lancaster and elsewhere have voted, typically less than 10% of their population, Nolt said. He has overseen post-election analyses of voting registration trends in areas with significant Amish populations — painstaking research that involves cross-checking voter rolls and church directories by hand and can’t be conducted in real time during an election. There are currently about 92,000 Amish of all ages in Pennsylvania, according to the Young Center’s research, which is based on a number of sources, including almanacs, newspapers, and directories. About half are in the Lancaster area and the rest dispersed around the state. But in a community with many children, less than half the Amish are of voting age, Nolt said. In 2020, he estimated that about 3,000 Amish voted in the Lancaster area, and several hundred elsewhere, he said. “Even if we would imagine, for example, that here in Lancaster, there would be a tremendous percentage in percentage terms … we’re looking at several hundred to maybe a thousand additional voters,” he said. On its own, that cannot come close to flipping a state that went for Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 by about 80,000 votes. Of course, the Amish are hardly the only religious or ethnic constituency being courted by candidates. “In a context where every vote […]