Caitlin Berry, 19, and Lawum Kayamba, 57, may have little in common, but this Election Day they will.  Both are first-time voters  and both are confident that their votes will matter.

Both are also more focused on the presidential election than on the legislative races and referendum questions that will also be decided by Maine voters next week.

Berry, who was forced to drop out of school in December 2015, when her grandmother was diagnosed with cancer, is hoping to earn her high school diploma through the South Portland Adult Education program.

She lives in Westbrook with an aunt and said she will likely register to vote as an independent.

“I’m definitely not voting for Donald Trump,” Berry said this week, adding that she just started focusing on the election in September.

Kayamba came to Maine from the Congo in 2006 and became a U.S. citizen in 2014. He is a pastor at a church in Portland and is working toward earning a certified nursing assistant certificate with Scarborough Adult Education.

Kayamba is undecided, he said, but is leaning heavily toward voting for Hillary Clinton, although he still has “some thinking to do about my decision.”

Both Berry and Kayamba said they’re not as familiar with the statewide referendum questions or who is running for local office in their community, but both said they would do research before filling out their ballots.

For Kayamba, supporting education “is very important.” He’s also concerned about the rhetoric around immigration, which has mostly been coming from the Trump campaign.

Most of the parishioners who attend his church are asylum-seekers from Africa, the same as he was a decade ago. Kayamba said there is a lot of worry in his church about what may happen if Trump is elected president.

Kayamba intends to vote at the polls on Election Day, instead of taking advantage of absentee voting, in order to have the full experience.

“I want to be there myself. I’m very interested to see how it all works,” he said.

While the name of his former country is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kayamba said, there “was no real democracy,” as voters were often watched by the authorities and told how to vote.

“This will be a big experience with no one telling me what to do and not being forced to choose a specific candidate,” he said. “Now I have real freedom to make my own choice.”

Kayamba has seven grown children, many of whom will also be voting for the first time in this election.

“I want to vote and make it count,” he added.

Berry watched her aunt fill out an absentee ballot in recent days and said her father also used to take her to the polls on Election Day when she was a child. She said the divisiveness of this year’s presidential election has actually been an incentive to vote, instead of a turn-off.

“It definitely makes me want to vote,” Berry said. “Before I was not as interested, but now I know that every vote counts.”

In terms of some of the local issues, Berry still needs to do some research into who is running and what the arguments are, but does know that she will support both the referendum that calls for legalizing recreational marijuana and the one that would impose background checks for gun sales by non-licensed dealers.

Berry feels she knows where to go to get the information she needs to be an informed voter.

“It matters and is important for parents to teach their children about voting because they are the future.”

It’s crunch time for next week’s election and political signs have cropped up everywhere, including a gaggle on the corner of Route 1 and Municipal Drive in Scarborough.

The entire Maine Legislature is up for vote and in Scarborough every seat is being hotly contested.

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