Politics is a family affair in the Smith household and voting has been important to Judi Smith since she was a little girl.
“My mother used to take me with her to vote. Kent’s parents used to take him with them to vote. I can remember we would each take one daughter because we only had two, so it was easy,” said Smith whose husband, Kent, is an artisan sign maker in Estes Park.
“We always discussed what was happening civically on all levels with our kids because they needed to be aware,” said Smith who developed the Junior Election program in Estes Park in 2016 three years after the state passed the Voter Access and Modernized Elections Act of 2013.
The legislation mandated that ballots be mailed to every registered voter for most elections and also eliminated assigned polling places and established voter service and polling centers where any voter in a county can cast a ballot.
The Junior Election allows students from an early age to become informed about what is happening on a local, state, and national level, and realize the importance of their constitutional right to vote, said Smith who coordinates the election with the Estes Park schools.
Depending on the grade level, some students vote with paper ballots and others vote electronically.
“Some kids vote, and some kids don’t. In high school, they have to decide if they’re going to vote or not. In middle school, they vote as a class. In fifth grade, they vote as a class. The younger kids don’t vote in school. They vote at the off-precinct campus, like the Estes Park Learning Place and the Estes Valley Library,” said Smith.
Students who are home schooled and those in special programming are given the opportunity to participate.
The ballots for the youngest students have photographs of the presidential candidates. The students in third grade through high school progressively have more candidates and issues on their ballots.
The only thing Smith changes is the language for some of the ballot questions because the official wording can be confusing, but the students vote on the same issues except for the judicial retention questions.
“Some of our 12th graders vote for real,” said Smith who hopes the students take their ballots home and talk with their family members about the election in the same way the members of the Smith family research each candidate and ballot question and discuss the issue as a family.
Just like the regular elections, Smith closes the polls at 7 p.m. The voting boxes are picked up and a group of friends gather at the Smith home to start the counting. Vote counters pair up in twos to count and then double count the ballots as live election results are streamed on the living room television.
The results of this year’s Junior Election were similar to many of the vote counts by Larimer County.
Tessa Ring is studying strategic communications with a minor in business at the University of Colorado-Boulder. She is a marketing and advertising intern at the Estes Valley Voice this semester.
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