Last week, I voted in my 13th U.S. presidential election. The process went off without a hitch, thanks to the integrity, competence and efficiency of the Colorado system. I dropped off my ballot on a cool predawn October morning, and as I left the drop-off site, another voter and I grinned at each other across the prescribed COVID-19 social distance. Then we each said some version of “That felt good!”
My voting life began in 1972, when I was excited to be able to vote for the first time at age 18 and eleven months. Just over a year earlier, President Richard Nixon had signed into law the 26th amendment to the Constitution, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18.
The Vietnam War-era military draft provided the impetus for this change. But the idea—and the slogan “old enough to fight, old enough to vote”—had originated during World War II when President Franklin D. Roosevelt lowered the draft age from 21 to 18.
The run-up to the passage of Amendment 26 was a bit convoluted. In 1969, Congress introduced 50 resolutions to lower the voting age, but none made it into law. The next year, Congress passed an extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act with a provision that lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 in federal and state elections. This provision was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, which concluded that Congress didn’t have the authority to set the voting age for state elections. Congress then proposed the 26th Amendment. The ratification process took less than four months — the shortest time ever for a Constitutional amendment.
In the summer of 1971, I had a summer job at a marker pen factory and was preparing for my first year of college. Although I wouldn’t turn 18 until December, the 26th amendment ushered me into the family fold of well-informed and opinionated voters.
I came from a family culture of community service, so I was expected to be an active and responsible voter. Dinner conversations about politics were polite but heated, with all degrees of the spectrum passionately and articulately represented. While there were disagreements, all views were heard. However, not to vote would have been frowned upon to say the least.
My mother, who served as the county Democratic committee chair for a couple of years, knew more about local politics than most—in a volunteer capacity and also as a newspaper reporter covering town council and school board meetings in our town. Later in her life, long after she’d gotten sober in A.A., we joked that those contentious and long-winded meetings had accelerated her progression into the disease of alcoholism. Like many jokes, it had a grain of truth. My father also worked professionally and as a volunteer on a number of political campaigns. He was volunteering for the ill-fated Eugene McCarthy presidential campaign during the year that I became an eligible voter.
Spending time with those two lifelong political junkies brought many hours of debate and discussion. We three were roughly aligned on the center-left of the spectrum, but generational, regional and gender differences spiced up the conversations. And if that wasn’t enough to shoo me away from politics, I was involved in the administrative aspect of eight different elections during my career in the public sector.
During my time spent working on elections, my co-workers and I used to get calls from citizens on Election Day who said they didn’t know where to vote, how to register, or what the issues were about. It seemed as if voting was the last thing on their minds and they just couldn’t be bothered to pay attention.
Throughout all those municipal elections, and after voting for seven losing presidents and five winners, I’ve never experienced anything that remotely approaches the 250-decibel shriek of 2020. Despite what I think of the current occupant of the White House, I do feel he works hard at his goal of getting attention.
On that note, if I still have your attention, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE celebrate your right to vote and get it done! Amid all the infernal racket of Election 2020, it’s still a joy and a privilege.
