Commentary: California makes it so easy to vote. We can’t take that right for granted

For this primary election I decided to cast my ballot in person after voting by mail the last few pandemic-dominated years.

Because I live in California, where every active, registered voter receives a vote-by-mail ballot, I had a lot of convenient options. I could mail in my ballot or drop it off at a secure dropbox. I could go to one of hundreds of vote centers across Los Angeles County up to 11 days before election day, or as early as a month before if I went to the county Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk headquarters in Norwalk.

I had a few extra minutes on the way home from driving my daughter to her gymnastics class on Saturday afternoon, so I decided to stop by a voting center at a local park. Colored signs guided me from a parking lot to a community center building, where there were rows and rows of ballot-marking devices. Few other voters were there and the operation was well staffed by enthusiastic and helpful poll workers.

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These conveniences would be unremarkable, if not for the fact that they are denied to so many people in states where politicians have passed laws and restrictions that make it harder for people to vote. So at a time when American democracy is under attack on multiple fronts, I felt a certain amount of pride to live in a state that tries to make it easy for citizens to do their most basic civic duty.

I was among more than 300,000 people in L.A. County, or about one-third of voters, who cast their ballots at a vote center, rather than by mail, according to election night data from the county. And my experience was slick and snag-free.

It took only a few minutes to vote and get on with my day. There were no lines. No cumbersome ID requirements or hard-to-use machines. After I fed my ballot into the machine I was pointed to a red carpet-style backdrop banner for a post-voting photo or selfie, if I wanted. I stuck my “I voted” sticker on my shirt and an election worker snapped a picture of me and my daughter.

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As we walked out, I thanked the poll workers for their service. Many of them are community members who make just $100 a day. Election workers are the lifeblood of our democracy and they have faced an increase in harassment, threats and intimidation because of false claims of fraud and election conspiracies by Donald Trump and other Republicans.

But with so many ways to vote, it’s shameful to see such low turnout. L.A. County was at just 16% of registered voters as of Wednesday morning, although the final turnout number will increase when all mail-in-ballots are counted. At a time when the presumptive Republican presidential candidate is an election denier and insurrectionist who has little regard for our most basic democratic norms, we ought to be ringing the alarm bells about the future. And we should be exercising our power as voters and using the ballot to defend our democracy from those conspiring to curtail it.

No one should take our democracy for granted. Voting rights are precious and fragile, and like the muscles in our bodies, atrophy unless we exercise them.