I walked up the long, wide, concrete driveway in the pale morning sun, stood in line and showed my

ID to the lady at the table with the massive voter roll book in which my name had recently been

inscribed. My dad drove me to the polls that day. I had said I wasn't going to bother. I just turned 18 and was now

part of the roughly 15% of the population who, under apartheid, was legally permitted to vote.

The election is a sham, I said. Why would I legitimize it when it is only for white people?

My father sat down and looked me right in the eye.

You really must vote, my boy, because you're actually voting for 10 black people.

You're voting to tell the racist government that you are part of the growing number of whites who don't accept their regime.

I'm Julian Walker, and this is a Conspiratuality Bonus episode, dropping the day before our own

gut-wrenching election. I'm going to share my personal reflections on witnessing elections

in three different countries between the ages of 18 and 22, and how that has in some ways

shaped my worldview. I grew up under apartheid in South Africa and have lived in England

and in the United States since fleeing

that regime.

The year I first got to vote was 1989.

The ruling National Party had been in power in South Africa since 1948.

The national party was the architect and the enforcer of the political and legal framework

that institutionalized the racist apartheid regime in South Africa.

Under this system, non-whites had less civil and human rights than white people did.

It was a caste system with whites at the top, having all the rights and all the freedoms and all the power and all the wealth.

Second came the Indians. Descendants of indentured servants brought over from the country of India, starting in 1860,

to work as slave labor. It's one of the reasons why Gandhi got his start as a lawyer in South

...