Alanah Johnson, Tiffany Gilliam, Sharon Gilliam, and Betty Gilliam are all graduates of the Bridgehampton School. They can share stories of cheerleading for the Killer Bees at different points in history, and now they have a new story to tell in a history-making election year.
The four women — daughter, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother — voted together at the early voting site at the Stony Brook Southampton campus on Monday morning.
They had been looking forward to this special moment for a long time.
For Ms. Johnson, 18, it was her first time ever voting, and for her mom, Tiffany Gilliam, 40, it was a re-creation of an Election Day when she herself was a teen in the 1990s, posing together outside the polls with her own mother, Sharon Gilliam, now 64, her grandmother Betty Gilliam, now 81, and her great-grandmother Eva Batts.
"I messed up the first ballot. I accidentally put a letter there on the write-in line and the machine didn't take it," Ms. Johnson said yesterday. "Other than that, it was cool."
"When we got there, the line wasn't very long, but because my grandmother is older, they let us go in," Tiffany Gilliam said. "We didn't really have to wait. But when we came out, the line was to the end of the driveway. Some of the other voters started talking to us, asking Alanah about how she felt about voting. It was nice to talk to strangers you didn't know about how important the election is while they were going to vote."
After they voted, they went to a nearby Dunkin' Donuts to celebrate.
"It's very important because our vote does matter," Tiffany Gilliam said. "In 2016, only 100 million people voted. We're not even at the general election yet and we already have 70 million people who voted. I think people really grasp the importance of voting for who you think is going to do the right thing for the country."