The primary election in California is happening today, but I’ve already voted, and here’s the acknowledgement that I did.  Of course, I voted—I always do. I’ve voted in every election ever since I was a child.

“What are you talking about?” you ask. “Children don’t vote; they’re not allowed to.” But I did and this is how it happened.

My father’s TV shop was the polling place for our precinct and my mother often worked as an election official. The day before the election, a truck would stop at the shop and three voting booths would be unloaded and assembled. They were made of canvas that stretched over a light metal frame. The canvas panels on three sides of the booth were stretched tight and attached to the metal frame. The fourth panel was only attached at the top and could be pushed aside to enter and exit the booth. Nothing was inside except a ledge or shelf and two items were on it: an inkpad and a piece of hard, red rubber, about three inches long and a quarter of an inch square. On either end, was a raised + sign.

The voting booths were incredibly exciting to us, but our time was not yet. We weren’t even allowed to go into the shop on election day. My mother said people were serious about voting and they certainly didn’t want to cast their vote while kids were running around, bumping into the booths, being admonished by the election ladies (the officials were always ladies, in our precinct). So, we had time to check out past newspapers and see what Stan Wakefield, the editor of The Oakdale Leader had said about the political scene and the candidates.

But our time was almost here. Either the evening of the election or the next morning (depending on whether the counting of the votes was completed before bedtime or not). Usually, we had to wait until early the next morning. My brother and I would march across our yard to the shop. Each of us held a ballot in our hands (our parents saved their sample ballots for this purpose). We entered the shop in silence—it was almost like we were going into a church. We would each go into a booth, open the inkpad, pick up the rubber stamp, ink it, and start voting, putting that + sign by each name we had decided to vote for.

I must be honest here. Perhaps we would be influenced by something Mr. Wakefield had printed in his newspaper, or something our parents had said, but we were just as likely to vote for someone we knew or whose name we had heard or, for non-local contests, who lived in a town near ours. The sound of the name was also important to me, although it carried no weight with my brother. (In other words, our votes for candidates are pretty reflective of the way many individuals still vote and were just about as logical.) Up to this point, our actions had mirrored the way the adults voted. But no one counted them, and we took our ballots away with us when we were finished

We hung around the shop, though, waiting for Stan Wakefield to show up. He went to every precinct early, the morning after election. The election results had been written by hand on a sheet of paper that was taped to the inside of the glass door. I can still see him, an overweight man, his pants held up by suspenders, his hat pushed back on his head, a cigar in the side of his mouth. He had a small notebook in his left hand, and he held it flat against the glass door. He had a pencil in his right and recorded the results, saying “Hmm,” occasionally when the dearth or excess of votes for a candidate were not what he expected. He would add the totals from all the precincts, and the results would be printed in The Oakdale Leader on Thursday.

Later that day, the truck would be back to dismantle and pick up the election booths. They didn’t want the inkpads and rubber stamps though, so our parents allowed us to keep them. When we’d used them to “vote” it was serious business, but now they’d become toys. We’d be looking for all sorts of things we could stamp without getting into trouble. Books were off limits, of course, but what about old receipts, magazines, our father’s list of calls he had to make? We’d find plenty of uses for those stamps and inkpads!