As always, YMMV. My political knowledge doesn’t extend much beyond my state, and your state may be different.
In my state, the fact you voted in an election, specific elections, is public record. If you registered for a particular party, that is public record. How many elections you voted in, and which ones (by date, primary, general, whatever) is public record, available electronically or as a printout for a small fee (or free) from the appropriate municipal clerks.
Lest anyone misinterpret this, Who you voted for is private. Supposedly. And I say that only because crooked clerks could very easily determine which ballot is yours. I’m not suggesting this is common practice.
Does anyone think this is a bit over the top for those who value their privacy?
Maybe I’m naive, but how? I go to my neighbor’s garage, stamp some ink dots on a piece of cardboard, and drop it into a giant locked plastic tub. Unless they’re going to dust the ballots for fingerprints or have a webcam installed overhead pointing down into the ballot booth, I don’t see how they could possibly match me to my paper ballot.
I guess electronic voting could be tracked, depending on how it’s implemented. If you vote absentee/by mail, your ballot could be tracked, since you have to sign the outer envelope.
As for whether or not I voted in a specific election, I’m not seeing any privacy issue. It’s my civic duty, why the hell would I want to hide it? The worst thing about voter registration being public is all the junk mail I get (and since I’m registered non-partisan I get crap from both sides, but at least nobody asks me for money.)
Maybe you don’t understand how the voting process works, at least in my state. When you walk in to the polls and give your name, you are given a ballot with a number on it. That number is recorded in the signature book next to your name. In my state, most votes are by paper ballot, scanned by a machine, but the paper ballots are retained in case of a manual recount.
All you need to do to find out what each person’s vote was is to match the number on the ballot with the number on the registration book. The only thing that prevents this is the legal requirement that a representative of both parties be present whenever such action is required; the theory is that while a republican might condone the action, the democrat will not, or vice-versa.
This doesn’t prevent an unethical clerk, who has access to all ballots, from performing the same action.
And absentee ballots are even easier. The outside of the submitted ballot has the person’s name. Open the envelope and there is the completed ballot.
Electronic voting might be a little harder, but less than 5% of our local voters use the optional voting machines right now.
Uncomfortable! That last step isn’t done here. The signature book and the sheaf of ballots never come near each other. No one can ever know which ballot sheet was mine.
If I were in your state, I would write my representatives and demand reform.
Honestly, I’m more suspicious of people who want to engage in official political acts (such as voting) that bind the citizenry, but don’t even want minimal information (such as the fact that they did cast a ballot at all) recorded or made publicly (but not especially easily) available.
Everybody wants influence, but nobody wants disclosure. Tough shit, I say.
I suspect there is a way; perhaps you never noticed what the poll workers are doing. There needs to be a way of verifying valid votes if needed, especially from absentee ballots.
A poll worker looks up your name on a computer printout to verify your registration. You sign next to your name so you can’t vote twice. The poll worker picks up a blank ballot, writes down the next voting serial number on it and also next to your name and hands you the ballot. In my polling place this is often done by two or three people sitting next to each other.
There have also been odd instances where there is only one registered voter in a precinct or only one voter shows up for the election. Since results are reported by precinct, it becomes obvious how they voted.
I voted absentee via email - per the instructions, the first page of the PDF was my voter declaration with name and signature, followed by a 1 page “optional ballot cover sheet”, followed by the ballot itself. I guess I just have to trust that nobody is going to open that PDF and scroll down a couple pages. Or, if the mailbox isn’t personally monitored, that nobody is going to go to the printer and look at pages 1 and 3+ of my voting packet.
I think the system could use a little bit of work.
In this day of directed mailings, if they could link my ballot with my name I would be most afraid that if for example I voted for Prop 64 [CO] (legalizing marijuana) I’d start getting pro-drug email spam and mailings.
If anybody could do that, then spam would be the least of anybody’s worries - you would open the door to buying votes (which is much easier to do if the person paying for the vote can get proof of how you voted), coercion, and possible backlash (imagine going to a job interview in California and your prospective employer has a record of your voting a particular way on Proposition 8).
Hmm. I went to the first table and signed next to my name and I was given a ballot receipt that had no personal information on it. I took that receipt to another table and the nice lady wrote 100 on the receipt and then gave me a ballot which I filled out and deposited in an electronic tabulator. Perhaps I missed something but I don’t remember seeing anything that established a link between tables one and two.
In order to fax in my vote, I had to sign that cover sheet and declare that I was waiving anonymity. Then I got a nice email confirming that my ballot had been received and read. So one the one hand, my vote was not anonymous; on the other, it was definitely counted.
If I’m registered democrat (public record) and actually voted (public record), in these polarized days I don’t think the thin veil of “secret ballot” is much of a cover.
I got a postcard yesterday in the mail that compared my voting habits to the average (number of times voted, not for whom). The card was very explicit in stating that whether I voted is public, but whom I vote for is my secret. It kind of creeped me out, but I got over it quickly.
I voted this morning and in addition to telling the poll workers my name and address, there was a pushy lady demanding information (the same information) from me. I asked her who she was and she said she is a “poll watcher.” THAT creeped me out. I didn’t answer her questions, but the poll worker did tell her who I was and where I live.
paper ballots are all identical. the voter places them in the locked ballot box, poll workers do not touch them. if they are scanned, feed in by the voter, that happens in whatever order people come out of the voting booths, maybe up to 20 of them.
i see no way to match a paper ballot to a voter number (the number you get sequentially as you check in).
with electronic machines you wait in line just as if you were waiting for a bank of pay phones, first in line goes to whatever one is available.
“Wrote 100 on the receipt”: were you the 100th voter? Then it could be linked to a ballot.
Take a look at that ballot again and see if there is anything unique about it – serial number, like, whether machine generated or written by hand. It’s entirely possible your state doesn’t do it that way, too.
I worked for a cause (pre-election) once, and we were able to get 10 years of voting records for each voter, including name & address, party affiliation (if any), whether they voted or not in each election. We could tell if they were active voters (they showed up for primaries and elections that only had issues to vote on, not candidates) and we could organize the data by home addresses, useful if we want to arrange transportation. We didn’t do this, but it occurs to me that we could have driven by each address and take note of the signs in the yard, a big hint as to how they will vote.
We used the info available to decide how and who to target about our issue.
I got one of these yesterday as well. Except even more creepy. It compared my voting habits to 5 of my immediate neighbors. :dubious: Makes me a bit curious as to the intent.
In my precinct there are only a handful of privacy booths. Almost everyone just sits at long tables to fill out their ballot. Seeing who voted what is pretty obvious to the election volunteers. Then again it is Minnesota so the major election results are pretty much a foregone conclusion.
Illinois doesn’t have party registration, but what ballot you choose in a primary is tracked, whether formally or by party poll watchers. I live in such a deeply-Republican area that several years back after a primary, we got a “how have we failed you (because you voted Dem)?” postcard from the county GOP party. My husband is a postal worker in our town and said the majority of postcards were of the “thanks for your support” variety.
In MN -
Go to table 1 - Let them find my name and I sign after it. Nothing else is written in “The Big Book of Voters”. Get a receipt, preprinted, with no identifying number or code on it.
Go to table 2 - Get told how to fill out the form.
Go to table 3- Exchange identical receipt for a black pen, a ballot with a hand written number in the upper right corner (I was number 308), and privacy equipment (a manila folder).
Go to booth, fill out form and insert the ballot into the reader (I was number 301, apparently I’m faster than average filling out those little ovals.)
So unless someone specifically followed me, to record the ballot number, there is no way to connect my name with the ballot.