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Ballots can easily be voided How? Voting secrecy requires that ballots (excluding provisional ballots) be separated from any individually identifying charact

Ballots can easily be voided How? Voting secrecy requires that ballots (excluding provisional ballots) be separated from any individually identifying characteristics immediately. election officials are usually present at the point where the ballot is fed into the machine Unless the voter votes directly into a machine, that essentially never happens to my knowledge. I can't imagine a scenario where ballot-tallying machinery would be replicated at each and every precinct. What happens here in ultra-high-tech Silicon Valley is that ballots are large paper sheets which get dumped into cardboard boxes, then later sent en masse to the county Registrar for tabulation. Please describe a scenario where a ballot can be voided by precinct workers. At best, if a voter is caught recording, they could be directed to vote over again with a new ballot. Precinct workers could neither deny that voter the franchise nor even confiscate the recording.

andrewla 9y ago
I don't think we're in as much disagreement as you may think. By "voided", I mean a voter voluntarily says that they messed up and wish to get a new ballot. This is done routinely because of mismarked ballots, etc. The scenario here is simply that a voter accepts an offer to sell their vote, marks the ballot in the proscribed way, takes a picture, voids it, and then submits a new ballot with their actual vote. In New York (and in Washington, where I used to live, before they went mail-in only) after marking your ballot (in NY with a pen, in WA on a screen and getting a printout) you put your ballot into a machine which scans the ballot and puts it in the local tally, and dumps it into a cardboard box, as you say, you counting later. That's the "machine" I'm talking about. By the poll worker's presence, I simply mean that if the vote buyer requires a video of the ballot being filled out and put into the machine (or the cardboard box) the poll worker will notice that the person is taking a video and will ask them to stop. Rather than preventing people from photographing their ballot through enforcement, this just makes the value obtained for "buying" a vote lower, thus serving as a disincentive. I mean, a vote purchaser could just take people's word for it too if the purchaser is not worried about being tricked by "unscrupulous" voters.

andrewla 9y ago

I don't think we're in as much disagreement as you may think. By "voided", I mean a voter voluntarily says that they messed up and wish to get a new ballot. This is done routinely because of mismarked ballots, etc. The scenario here is simply that a voter accepts an offer to sell their vote, marks the ballot in the proscribed way, takes a picture, voids it, and then submits a new ballot with their actual vote. In New York (and in Washington, where I used to live, before they went mail-in only) after marking your ballot (in NY with a pen, in WA on a screen and getting a printout) you put your ballot into a machine which scans the ballot and puts it in the local tally, and dumps it into a cardboard box, as you say, you counting later. That's the "machine" I'm talking about. By the poll worker's presence, I simply mean that if the vote buyer requires a video of the ballot being filled out and put into the machine (or the cardboard box) the poll worker will notice that the person is taking a video and will ask them to stop. Rather than preventing people from photographing their ballot through enforcement, this just makes the value obtained for "buying" a vote lower, thus serving as a disincentive. I mean, a vote purchaser could just take people's word for it too if the purchaser is not worried about being tricked by "unscrupulous" voters.