THANK YOU FOR VOTING

The author hails from small-town Texas and lives in New York City, places respectively conservative and liberal but that she characterizes as equally fearing “that their wants and needs will be ignored if their candidate doesn’t win,” which of course is no way to run a representative democracy. Neither is the steady decline of voting. As Smith notes, every generation votes in fewer numbers than the one preceding it, and minority voters turn up at the polls in fewer numbers, proportionally, than white voters. There’s irony to such disparities given the long battle to secure voting rights for minorities. The author reminds us that a white woman born in 1900 would have been allowed to vote at age 21 while “an African American born at the turn of the 20th century and living in the South may not have cast a ballot on Election Day until she was 65 years old.” Smith serves up a youth-friendly—though by no means youth-restricted—guide to understanding not only one’s rights as a voter, but also such thorny constructs as how polls work (badly, too often) and how gerrymandering keeps districts that should go to one party going to the other instead. Usefully, she provides a timeline of what to do not just to vote, but to bring one’s cohort along for the ride: First thing is to register to vote, then “choose five friends to join you to vote.” Then, 40 and 30 and 10 days before the election, be sure those friends know how to vote, whether in person or by mail, where the polling place is, and other such practical matters.

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