My first memory about elections was when I was too young to go to school, and my mother took me with her to the voting booth. She told me not to tell anyone that she was carrying into the booth a scrap of paper with a "cheat sheet" to remind her how to vote on the down-ballot candidates; she said that bringing such a thing was illegal. Was that ever really illegal, or did someone tell my mother that either erroneously or to intimidate her?
Another early memory is that my mother told me the philosophy behind not making it too easy to vote. If it's too easy to vote, then people who don't care about the issues, and haven't bothered to educate themselves about the issues or candidates, will be manipulated by others to vote the way they want them to.
On my high school's Math Team, I was the top scorer in my year. The kids in the year ahead of me were grooming me to be the team captain for my senior year. (In my junior year I was "co-captain", which was like Vice President.) The team expected that I would easily be elected captain.
When the team members protested, the guys asked us to show them a rule that said that only people who were on, or trained with, the team could vote. While we knew this wasn't fair, we had nothing in writing that gave eligibility rules for voting for Math Team captain. I was quite shaken by what felt like a coup.
We never saw Dormouse's posse again.
At a subsequent meeting, someone on the team pointed out that there was no rule that said we couldn't vote again, so we did so, and I won.
I wonder whether the Dormouse arranged to be elected so that he could state on his college applications that he was captain of the Math Team. He went on to become a philosophy professor, specializing in ethics.