You can’t just tell young people to go out and vote; you have to help them out

Ispend a lot of time urging people to vote. But it occurred to me (on Monday) that I had never delivered that message to my niece, Elise Hall, who turned 18 in July. Was she even registered to vote?

Elise graduated from high school this past spring and now juggles a job and classes at a local college. I knew she was civic-minded; in high school, she volunteered her time and expertise doing hair and makeup for women in homeless shelters. But I had a feeling that voter registration might not have been on her to-do list.

Turns out that she had registered online – good for her! – or at least she tried to. She got back a form saying she still had to sign something. I looked her up on lavote.net and she wasn’t listed as registered. That didn’t surprise me. Maybe her name hadn’t made it into the system yet.

So I decided we should just go for it: Show up at the polls and see if they would let her vote – at least by provisional ballot. When she was 3, I had taken her trick-or-treating, along with her mother and brother, holding her hand as she climbed up stairs to houses, clutching her jacko’-lantern bucket with her other hand. Now I wanted to take her voting. Hand-holding optional. She was game. She enlisted her lifelong friend, Sam Mizrahi-powell, to come along.

When I showed up at her home in Palos Verdes Estates, it was sunny and breezy and the air was tinged with the smell of salt from the ocean. Good voting weather.

On the drive over to her polling place at a school district office, we talked of matters small and large. Elise had spent the entire weekend at a music festival in Long Beach, where every performer had told the audience to go vote. Yet she worried that “not everyone gets the opportunity to vote and use their voice.” She also struggled, as many voters do, with the feeling that she was a very small cog in a large machine. “I think my vote is important, but I am kind of discouraged that it won’t mean that much,” she said.

Gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom also came up in discussion. “He reminds me of a guy out of ‘Scandal,’” she mused. Come to think of it, he does look like a character on a soap opera.

Inside the tiny polling place, as we suspected, Elise was not on the rolls. But they offered her a provisional ballot and she took it into a booth. She had no trouble filling it out (full disclosure: she went in armed with a list of L.A. Times endorsements), the only mystery being what to do with the foot-long ballot after she was done. I showed her how to stick it in the machine.

I stepped back and snapped a few pictures of her. “First election, huh?” a poll worker asked, chuckling. Good thing ballot selfies aren’t illegal in California, unlike 18 other states with irrational fears about voter fraud.

Sam, who is an intern at a movie production company, had already voted by mail. He was surprised by how long the voter pamphlet was. He had pored over it, reading the ballot analysis for both sides of every measure. “I wish we could have voted for certain parts of the propositions and not others,” he said. Don’t we all.