Every so often, Shirley Weber would come home from school and bypass the front door of her Los Angeles home.
She’d take the side yard and enter in the backdoor, careful not to disrupt those gathered in her living room. It was Election Day, and people were voting at 351 West 45th St.
The importance of voting — and access to it — was instilled in Weber, California’s secretary of state, from a young age.
When Weber’s family moved to their home in Los Angeles, her mother, Mildred Nash, volunteered as a poll worker and realized there was nowhere close for their neighbors to vote. There was no nearby library or community center. Not even a church.
So she volunteered the Nash home. People could vote in the garage, she said.
David Nash said no.
There are too many spiders and other bugs in the garage, Weber recalled her father saying.
So before an election day — whether it was a general or primary or special — Weber’s father and brothers would drag out the living and dining rooms’ furniture and lug in voting booths. Mildred Nash busied herself in the kitchen, baking pies and cakes and cooking chili, in case people weren’t able to go home to a hot meal after casting their ballots.
“I grew up with the idea that this was so important to my parents — not only that they voted, but they made it possible for this community to vote,” Weber said. “The polls remained in our house until my mother died.”
Weber, 75, has served as California’s secretary of state since 2021, first appointed and then elected to the position.
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber speaks to students at Chaffey High School in Ontario on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2022, about making the effort to register prior to age 18 to vote. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
The office — comprised of nearly 500 people — is in charge of historical records and the state archives. It maintains business filings and commissions notaries public. It operates the state’s program that grants a substitute mailing address to victims of stalking or domestic or sexual violence and public entity or reproductive health care workers who fear for their safety.
But Weber is also the state’s chief elections officer, meaning she’s in charge of making sure California’s election system goes smoothly.
That entails ensuring accurate voter information goes out to the more than 22 million registered voters — and in 10 languages: Chinese, English, Hindi, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai and Vietnamese.
It also entails making sure election laws, like campaign finance disclosures, are followed, all votes are accurately counted and the equipment used for elections is accurate, reliable and accessible.
“It is my responsibility as secretary of state,” Weber said when she was sworn in, “to ensure that more Californians are able to exercise that power through the electoral process and that our elections remain secure, accessible and fair even under the most adverse conditions.”
Before Weber was tapped to supervise California’s elections, she served in the Assembly, representing a San Diego district.
A longtime faculty member at San Diego State University, she co-founded the university’s Africana Studies Department and co-founded its W.E.B. DuBois Leadership Institute for Young Black Scholars.
But at San Diego State, she also developed meaningful relationships with her students — and she seemingly can’t travel anywhere in the world without running into one of them, she said with a laugh.
She’s been approached inside a New York City Macy’s department store. And once while shopping in Egypt, she heard someone holler, “Dr. Weber!”
“My God, can we go anywhere without these people?” her son said, she recalled with a laugh.
In this June 10, 2020, file photo, then-Assemblymember Shirley Weber speaks at the Capitol in Sacramento. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)
Like voting, education was greatly important for Weber and her family.
David Nash wasn’t allowed to attend school for long in the South and was semi-illiterate, Weber said. And he was “very committed” to ensuring his children went to school — and graduated.
And in return, he never missed a graduation.
“Every graduation cost him a half-day’s pay,” Weber said, because his job did not afford him extra time to take off for something like a family event. “So anytime he went into his office at the steel mill, they knew that one of his kids was graduating because he’d have to take a half-day’s pay off.”
“He didn’t mind at all because he was so proud that we were graduated,” she recalled.
Originally from Hope, Arkansas, where her family worked as sharecroppers, Weber is the first Black secretary of state in California’s history. Her grandfather never voted; although the 15th Amendment in 1870 prohibited denying someone the right to vote based on race, states enacted other laws to disenfranchise Black people from voting.
When Weber was 3 years old, her family fled Arkansas for California where her grandmother and other family already lived.
A family foundation already built in, she said, a support system to ensure Weber and her seven siblings could find success.
“We came to California with high hopes and aspirations, and I think in many ways, California has not disappointed us,” said Weber.
“Maybe that’s a comparison between what was going on with Jim Crow issues and no right to vote in Arkansas. Coming to California and having that opportunity available to my parents was, really, kind of the high point in their life and existence.”
The work wasn’t done for the Weber family when the polls closed on Election Day.
Those days, all the equipment and voting materials would need to be boxed up and taken downtown. And David Nash didn’t want his wife or the other ladies who helped to go alone. Together, they would box up the materials, load everything into the family station wagon and deliver their neighbors’ ballots.
“They taught us,” Weber said of her parents, “that (voting) was just that important, that it completely interrupted all of our lives.”
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