At least for us you had to be registered with your party to vote in the primary. The names of the voters were on a list, so we could be checked off when we came in. The poll workers thus had lists of all the Republicans and Democrats in our district, by name. So, there is really no private info being given out by requesting a Democratic or Republican ballot.
In regular elections, party affiliation is not tracked.
Texas doesn’t have official party registration, but when you vote in a party’s primary they stamp the party name on your voter registration card so it becomes your ticket to the precinct convention.
This story may be apocryphal, but when we were in Hawaii, I was told in all seriousness that in the old days, you’d enter the booth, and there’d be a Democrat ballot and a Republican ballot side by side, and you punched either one with a stylus attached to a pole above you by a string. And outside observers could look and see which direction the string was being pulled, and so they – and presumably your employer – would know if you were voting “correctly” or not, “correctly” back then being Republican. And I was told that was a big reason why Hawaii was so staunchly Democrat while we were living there, because people still remembered that.
cbawlmer and Bricker, as an Election Supervisor (a grandiose title for a mundane job), please accept my humble apologies on behalf of election workers everywhere. That sort of behavior IS illegal, and should result in those people being permanently banned from any type of poll work, and maybe stuck with a hefty fine as well.
To look at me, you won’t have a hard time guessing where my political sympathies lie, but I have never and will never attempt to influence anyone’s vote. On the odd occasions when a voter requires assistance, TWO pollworkers, of different parties, must accompany them. I certainly do not always care for peoples’ choices, but I take the oath of nonpartisanship seriously, and would not tolerate a coworker violating it, even if we’re on the same side. I have helped people vote for candidates I really hated, and made sure that their vote counted (in one case, I corrected a voter’s spelling for a write-in candidate, to make certain that that vote, which was for a real yahoo, would not be dismissed).
One time, when I was doing my first election, I screwed up and invalidated someone’s vote (I didn’t realize it until later). I feel like a turd about that to this day. cbawlmer and Bricker, DO complain about these incidents. There are honest election workers who will take action.
When my elderly grandmother votes in a general elections she does it with an absentee ballot, and it’s my aunt, her oldest daughter, who assists her. She doesn’t tell even us who she votes for, but I would guess she’s pretty much a straight Republican.
Grandma may be nearly unique in this country. She’s voted in 20 straight presidential elections. If she’d been able to vote at the age of eighteen, as is now the voting age, it would be 21. God willing, at the age of 103, she’ll be voting this fall, in November of 2008. There can’t be too many other folks out there that can honestly claim to have done what she has.
Wow, that’s amazing.
Posts like yours – and Baker’s a few posts above – make me feel proud of my fellow Americans. Posts like the OP and certain others in the “I Won’t Vote This Year” thread make feel ashamed of my fellow Americans.
The Them: What state are you in? In Texas, just one random poll worker helps voters who need assistance and party isn’t a factor. Poll workers aren’t allowed to identify themselves by party affiliation while they’re working, though it’s obvious on the day of the primary by which party’s primary you’re working. Your way probably is a better way though.
Mom didn’t share this story with me until months after the fact. I was furious, but at that point it would have been impossible to identify the malefactor, so I settled for encouraging her to protest then and there if anything similar were to happen again - which she agreed to do.
My mom has always been fiercely independent on things, and her vision loss was relatively recent (wet macular degeneration took her from 20/20 corrected vision to legal blindness in less than a year) and it’s been hard for her to cope with it.
In Wisconsin there’s one ballot with all of the parties on it. No identifiers beforehand as to which party the voter is voting.
In Hawaii, we were not allowed to say our party either, but when two of us assisted someone, we told them that we were from different parties. And that did not necessarily mean one Democrat and one Republican either. At that time, there was at least five parties in Hawaii, including “independent,” which I had to register as in order to vote even though it was not actually a party.
Minnesota is similar.
One paper ballot, Republican ballot on one side, Democratic-Farmer-Labor on the other side. Inside the booth, you pick which side to vote on.
cbawlmer, I’m in Missouri. State law here is that, every ballot must be signed by a Republican and Democratic judge. You are whichever party you say you are. I live in a very Democratic district, so there’s a shortage of Republicans to sign the ballots; to make life easier for everyone, I’m a Republican. If I lived in, say, Iron County, I’d be a Democrat.
I LOVE it when people get shocked when they realize that long-haired hippie freak is the Republican Supervisor.
The poll worker in the OP should be reported.
I received a pamphlet a few months back soliciting poll workers. And I considered doing that until I read further. The pay was abysmal, of course, but you had to commit to working the ENTIRE time the polls were open in addition to a training session, from 5:30am to 7:00pm.
Uh, no thanks.
I was running a booth years ago registering voters for the College Republicans.
We registered voters for all parties, of course, and in Pennsylvania you do have to explicitly declare a party affiliation or register independent. All of the forms were turned right in to the county.
One registrant was blind - but he knew me and understood I wouldn’t screw with his form. I filled it out for him, lined up a card on the line so he could sign it, walked the form upstairs and paid to have it notarized (required by law) out of my own pocket. He registered Democrat - I personally couldn’t have cared less. The booth was a demonstration of our commitment to the process.
As I said in my OP, the poll worker WAS reported.
Virginia does not require voters to register with a party, so we can vote in whichever primary we want to. By the time the primaries reached here, the Republican candidate was pretty much a dead lock so, though I have no intention of voting for either Hillary or Obama in the primary (or McCain, for that matter), I probably would have voted in the Democratic primary anyway, because then it may have meant something. Considering Texas was afterward, I imagine there’s plenty of Republicans out there who either didn’t bother to vote because it didn’t matter or, since it’s apparently possible in your case, chose to vote in the Democratic primary for the same reason I would have. Add to that, that I’m pretty sure Kerry was a lock by Texas in 2004, but Obama and Hillary are still contested, and I’m not really sure how much those numbers mean.