I voted today. I completed my ballot in my home office where I could easily research questions about ballot initiatives online and check out judicial performance ratings at coloradojudicialperformance.gov. Then I drove to the Denver Police Station on South University, deposited my envelope in the drive-up ballot box and rewarded myself with brunch at The Universal.
I like voting this way. It’s easy, convenient and stress-free. But I miss voting in person. I enjoyed watching everyone who was standing in line with me. Usually a diverse group — young and old, multiracial, multicultural, students and professionals, privileged and poor. We rarely even spoke to each other, but we had in common the willingness to stand and wait anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours to exercise our right to vote. I always left feeling a little better about my fellow citizens and the state of our democracy. Maybe it’s time to start voting in person again, because I can use every bit of good faith I can find right now.
It may surprise you, then, that my most memorable voting experience didn’t take place on Election Day. It happened at a Democratic state convention on May 21, 1988. We were there to choose between Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson to be the party’s presidential nominee. Dukakis had long been considered a shoe-in for the nomination. In Colorado, he had received key endorsements from Gov. Roy Romer and Democratic Party Chairman Buie Seawell. But in the final months leading up to state primaries and caucuses, Jesse Jackson’s campaign had gained considerable momentum. For the first time in American history, an African American male had a fighting chance to be the nominee of a major political party for President of the United States.
Colorado was not yet on the national radar for voting trends, so it was indicative of how close the race had become that both Dukakis and Jackson rigorously campaigned in the state in the days leading up to the April 4 Democratic caucuses. Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times reported that while there had been no official polling of caucus voters, “internal campaign telephoning suggests the race between Dukakis and Jackson remains close, with a large number of undecided voters” (“Colorado Important Democratic Battleground,”, April 4, 1988).
I attended the 1988 Democratic state convention as a Jackson delegate. It was a typical convention filled with lots of political speeches and no doubt some behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing by Jackson supporters who still held out hope they could change the final result by convincing some Dukakis delegates to defect. (They weren’t successful.)
When the voting finally began, I started walking down the hallway to be one of the first to cast my vote for Jesse Jackson. I was thinking mostly of myself, feeling proud to be a white southern liberal voting for an African American man to be the Democratic nominee. I was pretty oblivious to my surroundings until there was a noticeable stir in the crowd walking with me. It was the kind of feeling you get when someone important walks into a room and everyone gets nervous and excited, but you can’t yet see who it is. I looked up and saw that I was surrounded by a group of African American men and women ranging in age from about 60 to 90 years old. The looks on their faces caused me to slow down and move over to the side to let them pass. Then I sat on a nearby window sill and watched as they gathered into lines at the voting tables.
That was when I realized our state convention vote wasn’t just a formality in a politically unimportant state. I was watching a group of people who likely believed they would not live long enough to see one of their own become a viable candidate president, and with good reason. The Voting Rights Act banning racial voting barriers wasn’t even passed until 1965, and even then, violent intimidation of African American voters was commonplace, especially in the South. Few believed white people would ever vote for a Black candidate.
This group’s grandparents may have been slaves. They had lived with their parents through quasi-slavery, mass lynchings, poll taxes and Jim Crow violence. I could see the determination on their faces as they waited in line to vote. They knew Jesse Jackson wasn’t going to be the next president. He wasn’t even going to be the Democratic nominee. But it didn’t matter. Their votes for Jesse Jackson were solemn affirmations of something they no longer just hoped but believed would one day happen. And 20 years later, it did.
I waited until almost everyone had cast their votes before I walked up and added mine. I have a fairly healthy ego and humility isn’t my strong suit, but this was one of the proudest and most humbling experiences of my life. It was also a major turning point in American political history, and I am honored and grateful to have been there to witness it.
There have certainly been times when I’ve thought it was futile to vote. I didn’t like the choices or I felt like there was really no choice at all, especially when it came to candidates for national office who so often seemed to end up as cogs in a political machine that serves only the wealthy.
Maybe being raised in the south has something to do with how much I value voting. I’m more aware than most of the extreme tactics the KKK and other groups used to keep people away from the polls. First it was violence, literacy tests and poll taxes; now it’s confusing voter ID laws, last-minute polling site changes, and limited voting hours. But above all else, the most successful tactic has been to convince people that their vote doesn’t count, that it won’t make a difference. So there’s really no reason to vote at all. Why bother?
I never fell for those arguments. I figured out pretty quickly that if our votes meant nothing, Republicans wouldn’t be spending thousands of hours and millions of dollars making it harder for us to cast them. There could be only one reason. They are afraid of what we might accomplish with it. And well they should be.
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~ Jassa Skott, September 2024
