The government would still be prohibited from retaliating against anyone for their vote. The purpose would be for society to take action against people who vote wrong.
Or, we could stop trying to drive racists out of society, since it only seems to have made them stronger in situations where they can benefit from anomynity.
I think a case can also be made that expanding the crusade to the merely clueless, insensitive, or those who make ill considered statements or support the wrong causes(as happened to Brandon Eich) has created backlash among a much larger group of voters than the white supremacists. One of my hopes for a Donald Trump Presidency once he won was that it would mean we tone down the bullshit a little.
Very nice, also very tiresome is the habit of the many american posters to make bizarre sweeping generalizations about many topics as if no other model exists in the world but their model and their imagined policies, completely ignoring other examples and other models.
Without the last sentence, this post would have been fine. If the thread was about comparing different aspects of different countries, comparing the US to other countries, general American sentiment, etc. then perhaps it could be relevant. As it stands, however, it’s not.
You do seem to make a habit of trying to denigrate Americans. It’s not tiresome so much as it is jerkish when the topic isn’t about things generally American. I suggest you dial it back.
Do not personalize your arguments in this fashion. If you feel you must, the BBQ Pit is right around the corner.
Complaining about generalizations while making generalizations - I’ll assume that’s intended to be ironic. Do not personalize your arguments in this fashion. If you feel you must, the BBQ Pit is right around the corner.
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Turnout would have been much, much higher. People would be paid to vote, people would be sacked or evicted for not voting (and voting the right way), people would be bullied into voting by violent gangs.
English.
In Britain they were one of the demands of the 1848 Chartist movement, at which time the Secret Ballot was known as the Australian system.
“Most countries”, sure. But this doesn’t apply to states where voting involves no physical ballot. Such unauditable voting occurs in (at least parts of) Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, etc.
I actually like this idea. If there is no secret ballot, then I can sell my vote to the highest bidder. We can officially put our democracy up for sale.
I will ask a question of you, though, you say that the government would not be allowed to retaliate against you for your vote, what about your boss? If you followed this method of voting, you could really never vote differently than he commands you to.
That’s true, but it also applies to political advocacy. There are no protections from retaliation for your off work political advocacy by your employer.
I just don’t know why the vote would be sacred. There’s the other 364 days a year where we practice politics, and we aren’t being protected from retaliation on those days.
Advocating is taking it a step further. That is trying to get others to vote in the way you want them to vote. You don’t have to do that to participate in the political process. Advocacy is something that must be done in public, privately advocating something is rather futile.
You don’t have to go to rallies, or donate to candidates, if you are concerned that doing so could cuase reputational harm in your family, social, or work environment. When you publically advocate for a candidate or an issue, you are taking a risk that your employer could find out and not be appreciated, or your friends may not like that you are against their cause.
Voting is different. All that other stuff doesn’t matter. If you have 100 times the campain funding that I do, if you have 100 times the number of people advocating publicly for your cuase, none of that matters, if you don’t actually get the votes. That the vote is secret means that you can vote your conscience without fear of reprisal. You need to have some level of bravery to accept possible consequences for public advocacy, but you should not have any fear of consequences for marking your ballot in the way that you think is best.
The vast majority of people don’t do any advocacy at all, they don’t contribute to campaigns, they don’t go to rallies, they don’t even put a sign in their yard. They still vote though.
The “retaliation” thing is a red herring. Political contributions are fully public and exposed, and the same “retaliation” argument applies there.
The only other problem brought up with non-secret ballot is the buying of votes. But that could be taken care of with extremely strict laws punishing such, with maybe rewarding the “whistleblowers” handsomely. Ten times what they would have been paid for their vote, when the vote-buyer is convicted?
That said, I definitely am not for abolishing the secret ballot. In fact, I would go the other way and make political contributions secret as well. I am self-employed, so that doesn’t apply, but I really wouldn’t care for my employer or whoever else to know to whom I contribute. None of their business. Look at that Google firing recently.
So that may have the chilling effect on individual political donations. Which leads to such donations being skewed towards corporate, dark money or big donors. Is that what you want?
So, you consider standing on a corner and yelling that you should vote for John Schmoe to be the same as going into the voting booth and putting a check next to John’s name?
Political advocacy is, by its very nature, public. There is no way to change that.
Making voting public as well would not change that, it would just mean that you would no longer be able to vote without fear of retaliation.
Laws would need to be crazy complex for that to work. If I tell a couple friends that if they vote my way, I’ll treat them to a dinner, what do they get if they turn me in?
If they turn me in, is it just their word against mine?
Can you see any sort of motivation where a few people may get together, pick someone they don’t like, and claim that that person offered them $100 to vote for John? They get to see the person they don’t like falling under your strict punishment, and they get $1000 each.
Ah, making political contributions secret. That way, there is no accountability whatsoever in that process. That’ll improve things. At least now when our politicians are bought, we have some idea as to who is pulling the strings. Having no accountability means you may as well just turn it all over to the oligarchs.
I have no idea what you are asking here. That is exactly how things are today. How can how things are exactly today have a chilling effect in the future, and how can you ask me, when pointing out exactly how things are today, if that is what I want?
In some American societies, people who were revealed to have sieg heiled their way through Charlottesville have been subject to negative societal pressure. I think, broadly, that’s a good thing. In other societies, it’s no big deal or even admirable. To put it very mildly, I think that’s unfortunate.
In either case, agreeing that Nazis are bad dudes and shouldn’t be tolerated is not the same thing as changing laws to dox them. I would rather the pressure continue to grow at the local level rather than be applied the federal one.
Yes, I know. But there are functioning democracies which solve the problems of not having a physical ballot by, uh, having a physical ballot. Nobody solves it by making voting a public act.
Do you expect that officials who came into office via the buying of votes will be eager to prosecute the people who voted for them, or the people who did not vote for them? (Remember, they have a convenient list handy of who is in each category.)
Also, you’ve just created a mechanism by which the government is obligated to give an arbitrarily large payoff to a private citizen. The next day some terminally ill person publically and on record ‘offers’ someone a billion dollars for his vote.
I live in a country where vote-buying is rampant despite a nominally secret ballot. (If there’s interest I’ll post a longish report on it in IMHO.)
As Some Call Me… Tim points out, people elected through vote buying are unlikely to increase the penalties against it. And “whistle-blowers” have become increasingly reluctant to come forth in the U.S. — they do not enjoy a hearty whack of gratitude on the back. In Thailand, OTOH, whistle-blowers are quite likely to get “whacked in the back.”
[The present Thai government doesn’t allow vote-buying in Parliamentary elections … because it doesn’t allow Parliamentary elections! :eek:
They have just issued an arrest warrant for the highly corrupt P.M. they deposed 3 years ago — watch for more complaints by the American right-wing (and even leftists who have bought in to right-wing lies) about over-reach by the Thai junta.]
There is no reason in principle we can’t have a system where you can confirm that your vote was correctly included in the total tally but nobody can know which way you voted.
We certainly don’t have that voting tech today in the US. But we could.
I’m not sure whether there’s also a technical way to ensure that every tallied vote came from a different real and eligible person. If there’s not, then such a system could still suffer from the equivalent of ballot box stuffing, but would be proof against vote miscounting or undercounting.