I’m proud to say that I have never failed to vote in a national election. Back in 1968, I was a 15-year-old campaign volunteer for Eugene McCarthy, but too young to vote. My first vote was in 1972 while away at college. On my mail-in absentee ballot, this 19-year-old college sophomore proudly wrote in the name of John Hospers of the Libertarian party ticket. That write-in probably blew the minds of the poll counters in my little hometown in northern Wisconsin.
(Fun historical fact. Hospers technically came in third that year because an errant Virginia elector cast his vote for Hospers instead of Nixon. In that act, he also cast the first electoral vote ever for a woman. That went to Toni Nathan, Hospers’s VP running mate.)
Of course, Nixon won, but not for long. The next summer in 1973, during the start of the Watergate hearings, I was an intern in Washington, DC, working for the Libertarian Task Force. That’s when I first encountered Joe Biden, then a freshmen senator from Delaware. Our project was to rate every U.S. senator in terms of their fiscal responsibility. This morning, I dug up my copy of the old report to see how Biden fared. It turns out we didn’t rate any freshmen senators because they had too short of a record.
But I did come across a note from the leader of that Task Force along with clippings of the major national coverage the report garnered. He wrote proudly that “all of the big guys in the right wing know who we are” because of our report. Even in 1973, his reference probably included the Koch brothers who were young ardent libertarian supporters. I apologize for any role I may have played back then in fostering distrust of government spending.
By 1976 (with Nixon resigned in disgrace), I lived in Minneapolis and cast my first presidential vote in a real polling place. Remember those big mechanical voting machines? As I recall, I opted for Gerald Ford, who I have always viewed as a well-grounded and decent fellow.
In 1980, now in California with voting taking place in garages and other small precinct venues, I felt quite differently about Ronald Reagan. In fact, his victory that night so concerned me that I went into work the next morning to tell my biggest secret to my boss and co-workers: I was gay. It would take three more years to tell my parents. But it was the only way I knew to fight back against much of what Reagan stood for.
Curiously my extreme reaction turned out to be a good thing. As the Eighties went on, I was already “out” at work. It made it easy for me to work with other Xerox employees to convince the executives of that once very important company to be among the first to extend domestic partner benefits. And it probably also helped my partner Robert feel comfortable to be an equally open advocate at Disney with similar success.
Of course, there have been many elections since then. I even ended up voting for Reagan in his second run. After 38 years of filling out ballots, there are certainly votes I would cast differently if I were able to redo them (maybe that one for Reagan). But I have never regretted having voted, nor felt it was a waste of time. And whether my candidate won or lost, I never feared for the continuation of the American experiment.
Now I have that fear. That is why I voted early. That is why I encourage everyone I know to vote—even if I know they are going to vote for Trump. We all need to be full participants in our government. We need to own the results.
Please vote.
Please check out all my novels in paperback or Kindle format, including: Tales from the Loon Town Cafe, The Finnish Girl, The Devil’s Analyst—and my latest, The Long Table Dinner.
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