Officially, I voted for the first time, in 1976.

Unofficially, I had been voting for years. My mother used to bring me with her when she voted in the gymnasium at the Lincoln Elementary School in Summit, where I grew up. I have vivid memories of the mechanical voting machines and the curtains that surrounded them. There was a rod you would pull that closed the back curtain behind you. You would click down a mechanical lever below the name of whoever you were voting for. When you were done, you would pull the road to open the curtain and hear the reassuring sound of the mechanisms that let you know your vote had been recorded. It’s still my favorite way to vote.
When my mother first started bringing me, she would tell me which levers to pull. As I got older and interested in politics she would sometimes ask me, half jokingly and half seriously, who to vote for. And although my parents weren’t very political, I do remember that she regularly voted for the Democrats. That was significant because at that time in New Jersey, the two parties were very competitive in statewide elections. However, Republicans dominated the local races, including who would represent us in the US House.

Because of those experiences, I grew up thinking there was something important and wonderful about the act of voting. I honor that perspective with today’s #stampoftheday, a 6-cent “Register and Vote,” stamp issued on June 27, 1968, about three weeks after Robert K. Kennedy was shot and three months after Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down.

In practice, I know, voting isn’t always noble or powerful. I realized that in November 1976 when I went into what I recall was a slightly dingy auditorium in a school in Middletown, CT to cast my first legal vote. Though I knew who I was going to vote for, I remember looking at the ballot, which gave me the choice of voting for Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford, and thinking, “I’ve waited my whole life for this?”

Carter hadn’t been my choice in the crowded field of Democrats who ran for president in 1976. My first choice had been Fightin’ Fred Harris, a progressive who had been senator from Oklahoma. In January 1976, during my winter break, I spent a couple of weeks volunteering for him in Berlin, NH, a small city with a paper mill. Harris’ office there was next to Carter’s office, where you could get a welcome snack of peanuts, which came in small packets emblazoned with Carter’s logo. Harris didn’t fare very well; in fact he may well have drawn just enough votes away from Representative Mo Udall, a liberal who narrowly lost several key primaries to the more moderate Carter.

All of that came to mind in the voting booth in Middletown in November 1976. I sighed, and voted for Carter. Next semester I took a class on the American Presidency where Leon Sigal, then a young faculty member, accurately predicted that “Jimmy Carter is smiling…but not for long.”

Despite this disillusioning experience, I voted again in 1980, when, a few months after moving to Cambridge, I went into an even dingier elementary school and voted for John Anderson, a moderate Republican running as an alternative to Carter and Ronald Reagan. And I’ve been a regular voter ever since.

For the most part, I’ve been able to vote for people I thought were good, even if they didn’t excite me. On occasion, I voted for the person I thought was the better of two bad choices. And sometimes, I’ve gone to the polls truly excited about the candidate. (See for example, Obama, Barack, 2008).

Usually, it’s been obvious how I and people like me would vote but on occasion, I’ve known that my choice was part of an important late-breaking shift in attitudes. That was true in 1990, when a late surge of generally liberal people like me, helped Republican Bill Weld defeat Democrat John Silber (the divisive president of BU) in the governor’s race here in Massachusetts. It was true in March of this year at the start of the pandemic when, after much agonizing, I decided that Joe Biden in the best position to defeat Donald Trump.

Elections matter. And some elections matter more than others. I’m not the first to say it but this one matters more than any I can recall in the over three decades that I have been voting.

Register. Vote. Get Involved.

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.