It’s not just presidents voters are deciding on. Take it from a lifelong voter.

A lifelong voter recalls casting her first ballot for JFK—and in every election since. 

Among all the bureaucratic things we have to do in this world, registering to vote is perhaps the easiest. It takes just a few minutes. You can do it online from your couch. And yet, only 83 percent of eligible voters in Monterey County are registered to vote. Of those, only 73.8 percent showed up to vote in the 2016 presidential election. 

Officials at the Monterey County Elections Office have spent their careers trying to get these numbers higher. And Marilyn Benson has spent her lifetime wondering why it isn’t higher. 

Benson, who is 82 and lives in Castroville, cast her first ballot in 1960 for John F. Kennedy for president. And she says she’s voted in every single election since then, primaries and general elections, midterms and presidential years, for local and state candidates and for ballot measures and school bonds. This is the first year she’ll vote by mail and she says she’ll miss going to the polls, but due to her age she’s staying in to avoid possible exposure to Covid-19. (She plans to drop off her ballot at the county Elections Office in Salinas, as an outing with her friend of 46 years.)

“I always believed that you have a responsibility, it’s not just a right to vote,” Benson says. “I have always felt that it was a privilege to be an American. I came from a family that debated a lot of politics around the kitchen table.”

She moved as a baby with her family at the tail end of the Great Depression from Wisconsin to San Francisco, then to Marin County. She got married at 18 and moved with her husband to a town of 750. She worked as a nurse in Salinas and union steward for decades, until she was laid off at age 73. But it’s her longer-term family history, she says, that ties her to political engagement: Her mother’s side of the family traces their roots all the way back to Plymouth and fought in the American Revolution.

Benson’s three living children all vote, and so do her seven grandchildren and two step-grandchildren. She’s pleased about that, even though they don’t all agree politically. “I like telling them, you vote the dictates of your conscience, not the dictates of mine.”

I spoke to Benson in anticipation of today, National Voter Registration Day (every fourth Tuesday in September). If you’re eligible and you’re not already registered to vote, register. If you know someone eligible to register who’s not registered, encourage them to do so. If you know someone who’s thinking of sitting this election out, with high-stakes elections from your local school board and water board all the way up to White House, tell them 82-year-old Marilyn Benson doesn’t have patience for their excuses. 

“You’ve got a long life ahead of you. The mistakes that are made now, you are going to live with a lot longer than I am,” she says. “Those people that sat out the 2016 election because they didn’t like Hillary Clinton, or they thought she was going to win anyway—no, every single vote matters.

“I never thought the United States of America would be in the mess we’re in,” she says. “Not just the pandemic, but politically, we’ve never been this polarized. I think if our Framers came back, they would be shocked at what we’ve done to it. We all have to take responsibility—we all have to get out and vote.”

Whatever your politics, that’s something we should all be able to agree on.