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As a non-citizen who had a chance to observe how the process works in California, I was struck by how little emphasis is put in the secrecy of the vote. The who

As a non-citizen who had a chance to observe how the process works in California, I was struck by how little emphasis is put in the secrecy of the vote. The whole system looks reasonable except for how easy it can be for poll workers to know what you voted for. Beyond that, the system is clearly geared towards increasing participation and enfranchising as many people as possible (a good thing in a democratic system).

Der_Einzige 6y ago
They have an optional secret ballot in all the votes. So does oregon who was doing vote by mail before it was cool...
- drilldrive 6y ago
  Oregon has one of the worst voter-registration online systems in the country however, a date of birth + residency will give access to party registration of the individual, alongside some other information I believe.
  - krallja 6y ago
    That’s true of most states.
  - Rebelgecko 6y ago
    IIRC Oregon is one of the states that sells a big CSV of every registered voters name, address, and party affiliation. So really all they're doing is competing with their own business Quick edit: It's $500 to get data for everyone in the state, but there might be an extra fee if you want to know when they voted
    - drilldrive 6y ago
      Holy cow, that is nuts. Like I could actually buy that myself if I wanted? USA really needs a privacy amendment to the constitution quite badly.
mrguyorama 6y ago
A reminder here that it varies MASSIVELY state by state. Some states definitely are NOT for increasing participation and enfranchising as many people as possible and plenty of states have way more in regards to hiding your vote from the poll workers
- est31 6y ago
  But if you want to participate more in the elections than just R vs D, say, decide which candidate R or D should elect, then you land in a public registry, no?
  - mrguyorama 6y ago
    I think some states let you participate in primaries as an unaffiliated voter
  - estebank 6y ago
    It's not just party affiliation (which is public I think in at least most states) but also the procedures in place for discarding incorrectly filled ballots. Poll workers need to recover them and mark them as voided. It is not terrible, but it has a lower threshold of security than other electoral systems I am familiar with. Dropping a mail-in ballot in person seemed to have no plausible subreptitious election integrity attack I could think of though.
    - stouset 6y ago
      At least in California, all of these voided ballots are counted at the end of the day and tallied with the number of recorded ballots, the number of ballots issued, the number of ballots remaining, and the number of people who physically showed up to vote. To be honest, the numbers are always off by 1-5 (in a precinct of ~1,500 registered voters, with ~100 physical ballots cast) simply because poll workers are generally undertrained and out-of-practice so mistakes are made throughout the day. But the system at least does a decent job of limiting the amount of fraud that could happen at a single polling location. And there are hundreds throughout the city. Source: am an SF election inspector.
ryanobjc 6y ago
As a non citizen who worked the polls as a clerk, there’s plenty of ballot secrecy. Many people don’t care. But there are procedures in place. Sometimes people do care and they can obscure it. Once the ballot is in the box, disassociated from the voter then there is no more secrecy concerns.
- estebank 6y ago
  > Once the ballot is in the box, disassociated from the voter then there is no more secrecy concerns. There are plenty of towns where "everyone knows everyone" and a system that requires trust on poll workers in this aspect is a bit alien to me. For example, one system I am familiar with the ballot itself is not special, the envelope is (it has signatures from the poll workers, which is also problematic because they can potentially surreptitiously mark the envelope in a special way to associate the vote to a specific person), which makes it unnecessary for poll workers to ever be in contact with the ballots themselves. Overall, my qualms are minimal and am more concerned about the use of computers for the vote than anything else in the process.
brandmeyer 6y ago
There's variation state-to-state. In NC (1996-2012 at least), no poll workers touch ballots with identifying information in them. On entry to the polling place, a sticker is placed beside your name on a physical rollbook to keep track of who has and hasn't voted. The poll worker hands you your ballot which you take to a privacy booth to mark your choices. The voter personally inserts the anonymous ballot into the counting machine. CO has universal mailings. You mail (or drop off) your ballot in a double envelope, and only the outer envelope carries identifying information. One workstation examines the outer envelope to track who voted, and a different workstation processes the anonymous ballots. It requires a little more trust on the part of the voter, but also encourages more participation.
tomku 6y ago
Can't speak for other places, but every time I've voted in-person in Wisconsin it has been through a procedure that doesn't involve the poll workers seeing my ballot after they give it to me. After getting a folder containing a ballot, I take it over to a closed stall to mark it and feed it directly into the scanning machine when I'm done. Safe, secure and results in immediately knowing that your ballot is valid and accepted. As a sibling comment mentions, states and cities have a great deal of freedom in terms of the "how" of voting and some do it better than others.
wnissen 6y ago
Based on my long experience in California, I have no idea what you could be referring to. I am given ballot(s) in an opaque folder, mark my choices in a booth enclosed on three sides, and feed the ballots into the machine myself. There's no way for a poll worker to observe me making the choices, or the marked ballot. I suppose in theory they could use the order in which people enter to locate a ballot after the fact, but that would involve riffling through a stack of ballots! Voting is county by county, and it is run by human beings that make mistakes, but in the dozens of times I have voted the secrecy of my ballot has been entirely up to me. Party affiliation is not a secret, true, it is a public record. But the actual Please provide a lot more context than "how easy it can be" or please delete your post.
- stouset 6y ago
  Poll workers can’t riffle through ballots without being detected. The ballot counting device has a locked compartment where the inserted ballots are kept. Only the inspector for the location has the key (although this may be handed to another worker when the inspector takes a break). This compartment has a numbered tamper seal placed on it, and this seal is checked throughout the day and its number is re-recorded each time. Provisional ballots and mail-in ballots are similarly protected. They aren’t behind a locked compartment, but the boxes they go into are again sealed with tamper-evident seals that are—again—numbered and regularly checked. Of course, no system is perfect and inspectors are undertrained (a few hours of training once every other year or so), overloaded at times, and human. As someone in security as my day job though, I’d say the measures in place to prevent tampering, fraud, and ballot disclosure are reasonably sound. Source: I am an SF election inspector.
  - mjcl 6y ago
    And the Sequoia optical scanner (the 80s looking one) doesn't neatly stack the ballots inside, they drop into one of two hampers inside (ballots that have write-ins are segregated) and become a huge mess.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  In my experience, if the machine beeps and spits your ballot out, which it will always do if you don't vote on some of the elections (and I never vote the stuff I don't know about, like school boards) then the poll worker will grab it and try to shove it back in. I don't think they are trying to invade your privacy, they just are trying to be helpful. But, in the end, they aren't respecting the secrecy of my ballot.
cafard 6y ago
My experience in Maryland and the District of Columbia, going back almost thirty years, is that there it is difficult to impossible for a poll worker to know how you voted.
DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
> As a non-citizen who had a chance to observe how the process works in California, I was struck by how little emphasis is put in the secrecy of the vote. Maybe it's because we generally don't expect our votes to be revealed, nor do we expect serious repercussions if they were. If things change so that either/both of those things stop being true, we'd probably see a push for better anonymity.
kube-system 6y ago
In the state where I'm at, things worked a bit differently this year because of all the mail-in ballots -- but typically when I vote in person, my name is crossed off a paper list of registered voters and then I am escorted to a voting machine to enter in an electronic ballot that has no identifiers attached. Obviously that's harder to do with mail ballots, because we have to be able to discern that one voter submitted one ballot. (and my state also allows people to track their mail-in ballot)
- mulmen 6y ago
  Why is this harder with mail ballots? My state (Washington) uses a double envelope system. My name is on the outer envelope so I can't cast two ballots and the inner envelope protects the secrecy of my vote. Or do you mean you have to verify that the ballot is actually submitted after the name is crossed off?
visarga 6y ago
> The whole system looks reasonable except for how easy it can be for poll workers to know what you voted for. I was struck when the article said they were asking party affiliation before voting. >> The voter approaches their table, and gives their name and party affiliation. The party affiliation is used as a signal that something fishy might be going on if the ratio of R to D is very different from the votes recorded. Wtf? You can vote in secret but you gotta tell us who you voted with?
- eat_veggies 6y ago
  Typically you are already registered with a specific party affiliation (so you can participate in primaries) and this information is often available online. It's not a big deal.
  - dingaling 6y ago
    > It's not a big deal. It is a big deal in that it psychologically reinforces the mindset that you should be aligned with a party. Instead of voting for a candidate on the basis of their policies and merit.
    - Shihan 6y ago
      yes, that's also what surpised me and I have my concerns with it. They don't have to know my affiliation (if I have any), it's none of their business.

Der_Einzige 6y ago

They have an optional secret ballot in all the votes. So does oregon who was doing vote by mail before it was cool...

drilldrive 6y ago
Oregon has one of the worst voter-registration online systems in the country however, a date of birth + residency will give access to party registration of the individual, alongside some other information I believe.
- krallja 6y ago
  That’s true of most states.
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  IIRC Oregon is one of the states that sells a big CSV of every registered voters name, address, and party affiliation. So really all they're doing is competing with their own business Quick edit: It's $500 to get data for everyone in the state, but there might be an extra fee if you want to know when they voted
  - drilldrive 6y ago
    Holy cow, that is nuts. Like I could actually buy that myself if I wanted? USA really needs a privacy amendment to the constitution quite badly.

mrguyorama 6y ago

A reminder here that it varies MASSIVELY state by state. Some states definitely are NOT for increasing participation and enfranchising as many people as possible and plenty of states have way more in regards to hiding your vote from the poll workers

est31 6y ago
But if you want to participate more in the elections than just R vs D, say, decide which candidate R or D should elect, then you land in a public registry, no?
- mrguyorama 6y ago
  I think some states let you participate in primaries as an unaffiliated voter
- estebank 6y ago
  It's not just party affiliation (which is public I think in at least most states) but also the procedures in place for discarding incorrectly filled ballots. Poll workers need to recover them and mark them as voided. It is not terrible, but it has a lower threshold of security than other electoral systems I am familiar with. Dropping a mail-in ballot in person seemed to have no plausible subreptitious election integrity attack I could think of though.
  - stouset 6y ago
    At least in California, all of these voided ballots are counted at the end of the day and tallied with the number of recorded ballots, the number of ballots issued, the number of ballots remaining, and the number of people who physically showed up to vote. To be honest, the numbers are always off by 1-5 (in a precinct of ~1,500 registered voters, with ~100 physical ballots cast) simply because poll workers are generally undertrained and out-of-practice so mistakes are made throughout the day. But the system at least does a decent job of limiting the amount of fraud that could happen at a single polling location. And there are hundreds throughout the city. Source: am an SF election inspector.

ryanobjc 6y ago

As a non citizen who worked the polls as a clerk, there’s plenty of ballot secrecy. Many people don’t care. But there are procedures in place. Sometimes people do care and they can obscure it. Once the ballot is in the box, disassociated from the voter then there is no more secrecy concerns.

estebank 6y ago
> Once the ballot is in the box, disassociated from the voter then there is no more secrecy concerns. There are plenty of towns where "everyone knows everyone" and a system that requires trust on poll workers in this aspect is a bit alien to me. For example, one system I am familiar with the ballot itself is not special, the envelope is (it has signatures from the poll workers, which is also problematic because they can potentially surreptitiously mark the envelope in a special way to associate the vote to a specific person), which makes it unnecessary for poll workers to ever be in contact with the ballots themselves. Overall, my qualms are minimal and am more concerned about the use of computers for the vote than anything else in the process.

brandmeyer 6y ago

There's variation state-to-state. In NC (1996-2012 at least), no poll workers touch ballots with identifying information in them. On entry to the polling place, a sticker is placed beside your name on a physical rollbook to keep track of who has and hasn't voted. The poll worker hands you your ballot which you take to a privacy booth to mark your choices. The voter personally inserts the anonymous ballot into the counting machine. CO has universal mailings. You mail (or drop off) your ballot in a double envelope, and only the outer envelope carries identifying information. One workstation examines the outer envelope to track who voted, and a different workstation processes the anonymous ballots. It requires a little more trust on the part of the voter, but also encourages more participation.

tomku 6y ago

Can't speak for other places, but every time I've voted in-person in Wisconsin it has been through a procedure that doesn't involve the poll workers seeing my ballot after they give it to me. After getting a folder containing a ballot, I take it over to a closed stall to mark it and feed it directly into the scanning machine when I'm done. Safe, secure and results in immediately knowing that your ballot is valid and accepted. As a sibling comment mentions, states and cities have a great deal of freedom in terms of the "how" of voting and some do it better than others.

wnissen 6y ago

Based on my long experience in California, I have no idea what you could be referring to. I am given ballot(s) in an opaque folder, mark my choices in a booth enclosed on three sides, and feed the ballots into the machine myself. There's no way for a poll worker to observe me making the choices, or the marked ballot. I suppose in theory they could use the order in which people enter to locate a ballot after the fact, but that would involve riffling through a stack of ballots! Voting is county by county, and it is run by human beings that make mistakes, but in the dozens of times I have voted the secrecy of my ballot has been entirely up to me. Party affiliation is not a secret, true, it is a public record. But the actual Please provide a lot more context than "how easy it can be" or please delete your post.

stouset 6y ago
Poll workers can’t riffle through ballots without being detected. The ballot counting device has a locked compartment where the inserted ballots are kept. Only the inspector for the location has the key (although this may be handed to another worker when the inspector takes a break). This compartment has a numbered tamper seal placed on it, and this seal is checked throughout the day and its number is re-recorded each time. Provisional ballots and mail-in ballots are similarly protected. They aren’t behind a locked compartment, but the boxes they go into are again sealed with tamper-evident seals that are—again—numbered and regularly checked. Of course, no system is perfect and inspectors are undertrained (a few hours of training once every other year or so), overloaded at times, and human. As someone in security as my day job though, I’d say the measures in place to prevent tampering, fraud, and ballot disclosure are reasonably sound. Source: I am an SF election inspector.
- mjcl 6y ago
  And the Sequoia optical scanner (the 80s looking one) doesn't neatly stack the ballots inside, they drop into one of two hampers inside (ballots that have write-ins are segregated) and become a huge mess.
jeffbee 6y ago
In my experience, if the machine beeps and spits your ballot out, which it will always do if you don't vote on some of the elections (and I never vote the stuff I don't know about, like school boards) then the poll worker will grab it and try to shove it back in. I don't think they are trying to invade your privacy, they just are trying to be helpful. But, in the end, they aren't respecting the secrecy of my ballot.

cafard 6y ago

My experience in Maryland and the District of Columbia, going back almost thirty years, is that there it is difficult to impossible for a poll worker to know how you voted.

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago

> As a non-citizen who had a chance to observe how the process works in California, I was struck by how little emphasis is put in the secrecy of the vote. Maybe it's because we generally don't expect our votes to be revealed, nor do we expect serious repercussions if they were. If things change so that either/both of those things stop being true, we'd probably see a push for better anonymity.

kube-system 6y ago

In the state where I'm at, things worked a bit differently this year because of all the mail-in ballots -- but typically when I vote in person, my name is crossed off a paper list of registered voters and then I am escorted to a voting machine to enter in an electronic ballot that has no identifiers attached. Obviously that's harder to do with mail ballots, because we have to be able to discern that one voter submitted one ballot. (and my state also allows people to track their mail-in ballot)

mulmen 6y ago
Why is this harder with mail ballots? My state (Washington) uses a double envelope system. My name is on the outer envelope so I can't cast two ballots and the inner envelope protects the secrecy of my vote. Or do you mean you have to verify that the ballot is actually submitted after the name is crossed off?

visarga 6y ago

> The whole system looks reasonable except for how easy it can be for poll workers to know what you voted for. I was struck when the article said they were asking party affiliation before voting. >> The voter approaches their table, and gives their name and party affiliation. The party affiliation is used as a signal that something fishy might be going on if the ratio of R to D is very different from the votes recorded. Wtf? You can vote in secret but you gotta tell us who you voted with?

eat_veggies 6y ago
Typically you are already registered with a specific party affiliation (so you can participate in primaries) and this information is often available online. It's not a big deal.
- dingaling 6y ago
  > It's not a big deal. It is a big deal in that it psychologically reinforces the mindset that you should be aligned with a party. Instead of voting for a candidate on the basis of their policies and merit.
  - Shihan 6y ago
    yes, that's also what surpised me and I have my concerns with it. They don't have to know my affiliation (if I have any), it's none of their business.