This 6-year-old's homemade voting booth makes sure kids get a vote on Election Day
A 6-year-old boy in North Carolina is making sure he and other kids get, at least, a symbolic say in the 2020 presidential election.
Mac Mayer, of Asheville, North Carolina, created a kids' voting booth nearly three weeks ago after watching his mom and dad vote early in the election.
"Mac has kind of been really paying attention as my husband and I have been obviously talking a lot about the election this year, and then we were doing early voting," said Mac's mom, Chelsea Mayer. "He was asking about why kids can’t vote ... and he said, ‘When I grow up, I’m going to invent kid voting.'"
Mac, a first-grade student who is homeschooled, then told his mom that he wanted to give kids a chance to vote in this election.
Together, they used an art table to make a polling station, complete with a privacy booth and a ballot box made with cardboard. Mac also made a box for clean and dirty pens, and put out hand sanitizer for his voters, all things he had seen at his parents' polling location as this election happens amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Mayer and her husband also ordered "I Voted" stickers for Mac to hand out to his voters. They also helped him send absentee ballots to his friends and cousins in different parts of the country.
To accommodate in-person voters, Mac set up his voting booth at the end of his driveway and has sat out there welcoming any kids who come by to vote.
"He’s always been the type that he doesn’t like that grown-ups get to do things that kids don’t get to do," Mayer said of her son. "It’s fun to help him create something and get to see it come to fruition."
Mayer said she has heard from other parents thanking them for creating a way to help explain the election to kids, and to start a dialogue about the voting process and the candidates.
Mac plans to announce the winners of his kids' election via a video on his kids' voting booth's Facebook page once all the votes are counted, even the absentee ballots that may come in later, according to Mayer.
"I’m glad he’s getting something positive out of it because this whole election season has been really hard and the dialogue around it has been hard," said Mayer. "So it’s really nice to see that he is able to have fun with it and have it be something that he enjoys."
