Among the changes brought about by the CCP virus epidemic was a vast expansion of voting by mail. According to Ballotpedia, six states (Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, Hawaii) now conduct elections entirely by mail (sometimes with a few polling places to accommodate incorrigibles). Another 27 states have “no excuse absentee voting”, meaning that anyone who wants to can cast a mail-in ballot.
Resistance is waning. At one point, as part of its “Jim Crow on steroids” project, the Georgia legislature considered requiring would-be absentee voters to proffer a reason for being unable to go to the polls in person, but that provision (a rule that every state had until quite recent times and that 17 still retain) didn’t make it into the law.
Such arguments as are commonly advanced against mail-in voting center on how it facilitates election fraud, makes vote counts less reliable or may diminish rather than increase voter turnout. Those all strike me as pretty obviously correct, but I have a more fundamental objection, one that I’ve seen raised from time to time but that is largely absent from the debate: Voting by mail makes the secret ballot voluntary, and a voluntary secret ballot isn’t really secret.
Let’s consult an expert on how elections are lost:
Democrats “do not do well with white men and we don’t do well with married white women and part of that is an identification with the Republican party and an ongoing pressure to vote the way your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should,” [Hillary] Clinton argued at the conference in Mumbai, India.
The objective of the secret ballot is to protect voters from “ongoing pressure” to vote the way someone else tells them to, and the way in which it protects them is by making it feasible and easy to lie. If Jill says, “Of course, I voted for Trump, dear” after casting her ballot in a voting booth, how is Jack to know otherwise? If the ballot has to be filled out at home, Jack can ask to see it, and if Jill refuses, you know what conclusion he will draw.
The same is true if the person who wants to know is Jill’s boss, her union shop steward or a guy offering her money in return for her vote.
In an era of ever escalating political drama, in which party identification is for many citizens a form of religious affiliation, voting secrecy is an important aspect of privacy. Even if uncompleted ballots aren’t stolen from mailboxes, ballot harvesters honestly transmit every completed ballot given to them, the Post Office delivers all ballots on time, signatures or other verifying data are checked accurately, caches of ballots aren’t mysteriously “discovered” during recounts, and mail-in elections proceed properly in every other way, there is no prophylactic against “voluntary” disclosure of how one voted.
It wasn’t so long ago that everybody agreed that secret ballots are essential to a well-functioning democracy. Today, hardly anybody seems to care.
Further reading: John C. Fortier & Norman J. Ornstein, “The Absentee Ballot and the Secret Ballot: Challenges for Election Reform” (a history of the secret ballot and the absentee ballot in America, how they have clashed, and how the convenience of mailing in votes has undermined the secret ballot’s goals)
Hi, Tom! I agree. A few years ago, I made a similar post and pointed out that the laws against ballot selfies were good public policy, because they made it possible for someone to verify how you had voted.
Posted by: Bill Roper | Sunday, August 22, 2021 at 07:01 PM