This is how it feels to be someone who has never been politically active in their three decades of life, as they prepare to cast their first vote in a public election:
The walk up the featureless concrete stairs to the local courthouse only takes a few seconds.
Those few seconds feel like forever.
Your thoughts accelerate into overdrive as you attempt to hide the trembling in your steps. You remind yourself that this was not a mandatory summons; you had committed no crime, nor had been witness to one. No parking tickets, forgotten taxes, or eviction notices. For anyone else this would be a perfectly routine visit during an election year.
However, you can’t shake the feeling of being late to an appointment that had been made over a decade prior.
You and your family had never been politically active. In fact, this had been discouraged due to your upbringing in a conservative Christian sect. From a young age, you were instilled with the belief that political activism was irrelevant, since God would eventually fix things in the future. This wasn’t to say that you were above the law; even Jesus said to “pay back Caesar’s things to Caesar.” (Mark 12:17). Laws and regulations were there for a reason, and you would follow them as any good citizen would.
However, a question always tugged at the back of your mind:
Why wouldn’t I want to take an active part in making my community better right now?
You had never received a satisfactory answer; not from your fellow congregation members, not from the elders that oversaw them, not even from the Bible itself. There was the teaching that an imperfect, man-made government could never permanently solve the problems that afflict humankind. But as you grew older and started to think more for yourself, you realized that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people didn’t actively try to make things better, then of course things wouldn’t get better.
As you started to do more research, you realized that this faulty reasoning was not unique to your particular upbringing. Before the most recent national election in 2020, between 40 and 50 percent of the population that was eligible to vote simply…didn’t. Almost half the country did not exercise their right to have a say in how their government was run. You had to go all the way back to the year 1900, well over a century ago, to see this figure go below 30 percent.
There were many reasons for this: apathy or disillusionment towards the government, ignorance of how the system is supposed to work, the feeling that one vote doesn’t matter in a pool of millions, etc. And sometimes it is not the individual person’s fault. Through gerrymandering and other underhanded political tactics, a single person’s vote may effectively be suppressed to a degree that it effectively does not matter towards the electoral college. This suppression can go so far as to prevent individuals from even voting in the first place…
You stumble as the concrete steps come to a sudden stop. Pushing your way through the heavy wooden doors, concrete gives way to marble and you make your way to the large directory on the opposite wall. A quick glance shows your destination: the electoral office two doors down. Your timid steps through the doorway don’t alert the clerks, so you quietly take a seat and wait.
Another eternity passes, and finally one of the clerks notices you. With a tired but friendly glance, he motions for you to come over.
You nervously clasp your hands together as you stammer your purpose for the intrusion. He listens and nods as you relay far more background information than was necessary; when you finish, he reaches underneath the counter to retrieve a registration form and a pen. Handing it to you, he states that the first step would be to fill out the voter registration form.
With much effort, you shuffle to the side and steady your trembling hand to fill out the first page. What if you missed something? What if you accidentally filled out something wrong? Would that be considered voter fraud? Your mind begins to generate worst-case scenarios as you turn to the second page…
…except there was no second page. You flip it over multiple times, certain you had missed something. Perhaps the clerk had only given you the first part of the mountain of legal forms required?
The clerk notices your confused look and returns to the counter with a subtle smirk. Your confusion smooths over the stammer in your voice as you ask if you missed anything on the form. The clerk shakes his head and begins explaining what to expect next. It will take a few days for it to be processed, then your voter card will arrive about a week later. The mail-in ballot would shortly follow, and finally you could fill it out and return it by mail or by one of the local ballot boxes.
“Do you have any questions for me?” he finishes.
The confusion in your voice becomes obvious as you ask where the rest of the registration form was. The clerk chuckles as he reiterates that all you need to do now is wait for your ballot to arrive.
It dawns on you that you were done.
Unlike other legal processes, there wasn’t a stack of papers to complete or a convoluted chain of people you would need to bounce between. In a grand total of about five minutes, you became a registered voter.
…Huh.
It couldn’t have been that easy, right? Surely there was something you were missing. No legal process could go so smoothly, so quickly. As you made your way back down the concrete steps, your new worry was when the other shoe would drop.
But it was that easy. As the clerk promised, your voter card showed up in the mail a few days later. The 2024 general election ballot arrived shortly after that; you filled out your choices for government offices, many of which you didn’t know existed. While dropping it off in a ballot box would be faster, you remembered the recent firebombing of a one such box in Portland and decided to entrust it to the United States Postal Service. Disrupting the sending or receiving of mail is a federal crime with heavy penalties, and the USPS has its own investigative branch that does not mess around.
Finally, a few days later you confirm through Oregon’s official government website that your ballot had been received and recorded.
In the space of a week, you had registered to vote, received your ballot, and verified it would be valid. The vast majority of that time was simply…waiting. If you hadn’t recently moved to Oregon and still had an out-of-state ID, you would have been able to do most of the legwork online and shorten the process considerably.
Ultimately, you don’t know how this pivotal national election will turn out. But the outcome, as important as it is, is not the point. In contrast to everything you had been taught and told to believe, voting is of vital importance to each and every citizen in a democratic government.
And it was shockingly simple.
A few days before Election Day, you feel a little less nervous than you did in years prior. Instead of powerlessness and uncertainty, you feel something unfamiliar:
You feel proud.
This is how it feels to be an American making their voice heard.
