My husband and I used to vote in person. After work, Gary and I would drive the curving Highway 101 north in the dark, six miles to the Chamber of Commerce or the City Hall or the Presbyterian church in Cannon Beach to vote. The location varied, the poll workers did not. Older women always worked the polls. We did this in the evening after my husband finished work in Tillamook County, which meant we arrived at the polling station just before eight, near the end of the day. 

The poll workers sitting at folding tables smiled when we came in, found our names on their tally sheets—he under A for Anderson and me further along in the list in front of a different volunteer under P for Priddy. They put their finger on the places we had to sign and handed us our ballots. They knew us. We took our paper ballot into the little portable voting booth, one at a time because our boys were little, and we had to take turns. In privacy, we marked them with a black pen or punched holes to indicate our choices. The voting took only a few minutes, and we’d drive home and put our boys to bed.

Before Election Day, I’d have talked to local people about who was running, listened to their opinions and advice. We often disagreed, some of us more liberal, some of us not. No one accused anyone of being evil or demented for our differing views. We trusted one another and politicians to act in good faith. We all had our experiences and values to guide us. We had values.

Back in the days before the internet, we watched the Portland news station for state and federal elections but had to wait for the local papers to find out who was on the Clatsop Community Board and the Water District, or whether the school levy passed.

I was young then. I had been voting for only a few years and then ten years passed, and then it all changed to mail-in ballots in our state. 

Voting from home, my husband and I sit at the dining table, voting pamphlet between us, and make our choices. My husband reads more news than I do these days. Icelandic news and Al Jazeera and the BBC in addition NPR and local and national newspapers. Most often, he is already certain, before he sits down, how he will vote, even on the local measures. He is usually done first. Sometimes, about some issues, we are still undecided, despite everything.

Sometimes I ask, How did you vote on…? And my husband will tell me, and I will read again the explanation in the voters’ pamphlet. Sometimes, he asks, How did you vote…? We’ll talk about the issues, about who is supporting, who is opposing measures in the pamphlet, what it will cost us either way. Most local measures involve money. 

I’ve voted against my own interests now and again. Years ago, I voted against a measure that limited property taxes because I feared how it would impact local schools. It passed anyway, and school funding was impacted as I’d feared. But even though I voted against it, would vote against it again, that measure has allowed us to stay in our home, because otherwise property taxes would have driven us out a decade ago. Right is right.

Once in a great while, our votes cancel one another out. I vote yes and he votes no, or the other way around. More often, we agree. Sometimes, when there is no opposition, no statement in the voters’ pamphlet, and we don’t know the candidate, we leave a position blank. It feels like cheating. 

The word democracy comes from ancient Greek: δημοκρατία, romanized: dēmokratía, dēmos “people” and kratos “rule” or power. The democracy our founders looked to began in the 6th century BCE. In the city state of Athens, all citizens were required to vote as a condition of residence in that city and its surrounding Atticus. Men who failed to vote were failures to their nation. Unlike our democracy in the United States and many other nations, Athenians voted directly for everything, position or rule.

To be an Athenian citizen, a man must have been born of an Athenian father. And it was only men, of course, not children, women, freed people, slaves, or foreign residents, who were counted as citizens. There were at least a quarter million inhabitants of greater Athens, but only 100,000 were counted as citizens. It’s wise to recall the whole of our aspirational foundation.

Slaves had no rights at all, and freed slaves and foreigners kept their heads down. Most of my neighbors, if they lived in ancient Athens would understand they lived there only at the pleasure of the elite.

Women, wealthy or not, had few rights or privileges. The lived with restrictions on their clothing and ornaments, and no part in public life. Women were considered overly sexual, unintelligent, and untrustworthy. They were limited in the way my grandfather thought of his daughters: “Children should neither be heard nor seen much of.” This attitude is familiar to me. Every woman I know hears that bias against them is natural and right. Even today. A math teacher informed me that women were weak in abstract reasoning, and I told him I’d tested in the 99th percentile. I doubt that convinced him. Fortunately, he and my grandfather are not in charge of suffrage in our country. Theirs isn’t the deciding vote. Aristotle, that promoter of reason and logic, believed men had more teach than women. Apparently, he’d never thought to check. And why should he, as a citizen, bother verifying his prejudices?

Sometimes, even today, my husband and I joke: It’s their world; we just live in it.

I am allowed to vote. I was allowed my anonymous opinion inside that voting booth, and now sitting at my dining table and reviewing the issues, no one can decide my vote matters less than that of someone else. If I fail to vote, no one minds, that I owe taxes does not impact my right to vote. I was born in this country, as were my parents and three of my grandparents. The fourth was not and perhaps never was. I have rights, and included with my citizenship is the right to vote in elections.

The founders were aware of how the Athenian system worked, but ours is a representative democracy, not what they had: direct representation. With a widespread population from our beginnings, we do not vote directly on most issues. We choose a president and Representatives and Senators who work full time on the other side of the country to keep things working for people like me. That I have rights because I was born here or born of at least one American parent or because I have successfully pursued citizenship, is not an accident. That was how we founded our stolen nation.

America is the great experiment. Emigrants from nations that actively discriminated on the basis of birth, nations that had codified the status into law. Here, people tried their best to sustain their bigotry, but over time, some of that has been overcome. People have fought and sued and died for freedom. Both the wording of the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution are ideals, representing a yet-to-achieve goals, but goals nonetheless.

The theory was that everyone should have the same rights, the same opportunity to strive and achieve, to pursue happiness. It trusted all people living here at its founding to vote. Today, I can vote even though I am a woman and even though I don’t travel to a polling place and even though I do not have an estate or power or an army to back me.

For thousands of years, the European system worked another way. In what would become Italy and Spain and France and the UK, governance was controlled by money and military power. Instead of one in twenty-five having power, one man (or sometimes even a woman) had power over hundreds or thousands, and even millions. One person or a family controlled everything. It is still true in nations around the world. That elite person or family chose laws, dictated to courts, and defined how everyone else was required to behave. No ordinary person, free or slave, man or woman or child, was allowed a vote about this. There was no vote for ordinary people.

But I am an ordinary person and I live now and here. My family is only one among many. We all matter. My vote counts, but no more than the dictates of anyone else. No one will know if I fail to vote, only my husband and myself. It is my duty to study the issues and the people and to vote. So that night, I sat at the dining room with my husband at my right hand, and we discussed the candidates and the issues, and we voted. We did not see our choices prevail, but we did what we could do.