Essay: I can’t vote yet, but I just helped run the Colorado elections

It is 7 a.m., the Fort Collins Senior Center doors are officially open. Everyone is standing at attention and ready: the greeters, smiling and prepared to help voters; upper election management and the watcher surveying the room; and the judges, my job in this perfectly oiled machine.

I am logged on, ready to send voters to the booths and silently repeating my script, the one meant to put each voter at ease and get them situated before they head to the booths. That script will forever be seared into my brain, because I repeated it hundreds of times to voters throughout the day.

I’m 16. Over the course of my entire, albeit relatively short life, I have read countless, screaming headlines about democracy. Some saying it’s not working, others arguing that it will prevail, plus endless questions and discussions about whether elections will be rigged. 

I was taught to mistrust the system in its entirety, the election officials, the workers and everyone part of it. Maybe they were doing something suspect or illegal, but it was never clear to me why.

Nov. 3 changed that for me, when I saw democracy working on the ground as part of the Student Election Judge Program. Whether someone was a Democrat, Republican, unaffiliated or in another party, everyone worked side by side throughout it all. Bipartisan teams took on tasks together, hand in hand.

It didn’t matter if you had on a blue or red lanyard. In the middle of it all, everyone was working tirelessly and checking in on me, a teenager, and one another with kindness, care and empathy. 

As a judge at least 40 years younger than the rest of the workers, I believed I might be given menial tasks, or asked to just sit in the corner and watch the adults take charge. But that never happened. I was given my role that I was trained for. 

And whenever issues came up, such as a voter without the proper identification or a judge mistakenly printing a ballot out twice, the whole team of election officials stood by to make sure that all votes would be correctly counted, that all mistakes were accounted for with paper proof of how we fixed them, and that eligible voters had their right to vote.

Election Day was not without chaos. There were sometimes long lines, printers malfunctioned and needed to be fixed, or a voter took an inordinately long time in the booth and held up others. Not once did that make me question the integrity of the process, in fact it was the opposite. 

I understood for the first time that despite the headlines I grew up with, that our elections depend on volunteers who are regular people: like the older adult who had done this many times, the teacher who took the day off, and many others who simply wanted to ensure that our system works. All of us were in at 5:45 a.m., or even earlier, and ended our day at 8:30 p.m. 

We didn’t check our phones or election results until after our shift ended. The process depended on many tedious checks and balances, numerous election officials closely observing everything that happened, and many caring people who are willing to work hard on behalf of their fellow Americans to ensure our electoral system works and is fair.

As a young person, I want adults to talk about elections the way the people running them experience them and to see my generation as participants, rather than bystanders. 

In two years when I can actually vote, I will carry this appreciation for the privilege of voting itself, and the people working behind the scenes to ensure the election is secure, accessible and trustworthy.

Korbin Wittemyer, of Fort Collins, is a student at Rocky Mountain High School.

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