This blog posts on Election Day, 2024. I hope you’ve already dropped your ballot off at one of the drop boxes (conveniently located at library branches county-wide), but if you’re reading this before 8pm on November 5th, then there is still time to vote!
I have a memory from when I was probably about 6 years old of going with my mom to her polling place, which was at my elementary school. The voting booths had red, white, and blue curtains for privacy. A nice lady from our church checked my mom in, and I got to go with her into her voting booth. I didn’t really grasp what was going on, but I understood that it was important, and I needed to be quiet and pay attention. I came away with a sense of reverence for the whole process, an early impression that has carried forward through the years.
I’ve always enjoyed voting, and once we had kids of our own, my husband and I took them with us when we lived in places where voting took place in person. I vividly recall our oldest at age 5, waving a little American flag left over from the 4th of July as we walked to our local fire station to vote.
There’s something about the act of voting that feels really good. Now that I live in a state with mail-in voting, I love sitting at my dining room table and filling in the bubbles. This year, I talked through the candidates and measures with my 11-year-old as I voted. I even love slipping my ballot into the drop box, decisions made, responsibility completed.
Working in libraries around election time, we are privileged to help people learn what they need to do to vote. We have voter registration forms in our branches, we help patrons check their registration status, we direct people to where they can access voter guides, and of course we host the ballot boxes. One of my proudest memories of providing this service was, gosh, maybe 12 years ago now, when I helped a woman in her 90s, who had been born before the 19th Amendment was passed, locate her polling place because she was determined to vote.
It still shocks me when I remember that the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, nationwide, was only ratified in 1920. That’s just a little over a hundred years ago, and while that is now outside of most living memory, we can’t afford to forget that history or the determination, struggle, and sacrifice of those who worked for women’s suffrage. In 1869, the 15th Amendment granted voting rights to Black men. It was not until almost 100 years after that, with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that discriminatory voting practices (such as literacy tests and poll taxes that kept many Black people from voting) were outlawed. That’s certainly within the memory of many people, enough that we should know better than to take the right to vote for granted.
Our voting system isn’t perfect, but by its nature, democracy is a government built on compromise and imperfection. It isn’t the beginning or the end of civic responsibility, but voting is kind of a punctuation mark, where we pause to make choices that have a direct impact on what happens next. As civil rights activist and member of the House of Representatives John Lewis said, “Democracy is not a state, it is an act.” A democratic government requires participation. When we vote, we claim our power as citizens and exercise the rights that so many Americans have fought and worked to ensure for us, from the Revolution, through Suffrage, and Civil Rights. Sitting an election out gives that power away.
Many of the most memorable and admirable figures in our country’s history have pushed for expanding access to the right to vote. Thanks to their hard work and persistence, that right is mine, and I think of it as both a right and a responsibility, one I hope to instill a sense of in my children. It is a value I want to teach them, like any other, by involving them and setting an example.
If you would like to share some information about voting and our democracy or some stories of the history of voting rights with children in your life (or if you would just like to refamiliarize yourself with that history) I encourage you to browse these lists of library materials for children, teens, and adults. And if you do have kids in your orbit, consider involving them when you vote or participate in other aspects of civic life. They’re growing up fast, and the future is theirs to shape.