Voting can be a Family Affair

This week’s civics column is going to be personal. I hope that’s alright with you, our amazing SCOOP readers and subscribers

- Thera Martin

I want to share my election day experience with you.

For me, it started at 7:30 am on May 16, when I arrived with my twenty-three-year-old granddaughter at the Dorothy Emmanuel Recreation Center in the mighty fiftieth Ward in Mount Airy. She has been voting since she was eighteen, but I would definitely still call her a new and inexperienced voter. She’s learning. Going together was just a wonderful thing, and this isn’t the first time of course. I can go back to when Barak Obama was running for office for the first time for President in 2007. I took both my grandchildren with me and into the booth (with me) when I voted. It was just that much of a historic moment to me.

This will be the first time that my granddaughter and I went to the polling place together, and she is a registered voter. I am always happy and jubilant on election day and sort of dance my way into the voting area because I love to vote. If I never feel powerful on any other days of the year, when it’s the Primary Election and the General Election, somehow, I feel powerful. I feel like my vote, added to other votes of like-minded people, can make a difference in bringing qualified candidates into office. I don’t know if my granddaughter felt a little embarrassed because her grandmom was dancing at the polls and talking to strangers and rejecting poll workers of candidates I don’t give a hoot for--she hung in there with me. She didn’t pretend that she wasn’t with me. My grandchild still claimed me.