9 ms·

What Americans lost when we abandoned the secret ballot

23 points by TheMonarchist 5y ago

josephcsible 5y ago
IMO, right now we're in the worst of both worlds. The ballot is secret enough that fraud is possible, but non-secret enough that coercion is possible. If we don't want to restrict non-in-person voting back to how it was in 2016, then maybe we should make everyone's votes completely public. At least then, any fraud would be immediately and obviously apparent.
- wefaewg 5y ago
  Or you know you could just ask people for their id like they ask people for the vaccination status in SF. You have to have a id to drive a car. You have to have an id to buy alcohol. Is it such a crime to ask for id when you vote?
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    I 100% agree we should ask for ID at polling places. But does that really do any good if everyone's allowed to vote by mail for no reason?
    - hansthehorse 5y ago
      ID is ok as long as it's stupid easy to obtain if you don't have what is the default national id drivers license. The faction that tries to suppress voting want voter ID so they can then restrict what ID is needed to get government issued ID without holding a drivers license. Voter ID isn't the issue, how to get the ID is. There is a solution though. Issue a national health card at birth with a requirement to have it reissued with a picture after age 18. So Medicare for all solves two issues. Health care and voter ID.
      - mbrumlow 5y ago
        Here is a site that I think was meant to show how bad it is, but could be condensed down if they wanted to actually help people. https://www.vote.org/voter-id-laws/ https://www.vote.org/voter-id-laws/ The info here seems to contradicts your statements, so if you don’t agree, don’t yell at me, talk to the site.
        josephcsible 5y ago
        Requiring a copy of photo ID to be mailed is a joke. The entire point of photo ID is that you're supposed to make sure the picture on the ID matches the person who handed it to you.
    - anonymouse008 5y ago
      I still get a gear ground when I remember what little information it takes to request a ballot and how much information was leaked in Equifax.
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    If you require ID to vote then you have a situation where the GOP has an incentive to make it more expensive and more hassle to get ID. Fuck that.
    - QuarterReptile 5y ago
      Hmm, a GOP conspiracy to make the DMV work poorly...
      - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
        The GOP was opposed to the motor voter law in the 90s because they didn’t want to have to nerf the DMVs?
  - kingkawn 5y ago
    There shouldn’t be a state controlled process between the population and voting
    - watersb 5y ago
      In the true sense that the people are the state, a democracy would hold that the people can push through changes to the system that might not be in the interest of those who currently hold power under the very system the people are trying to change. And yet... how does a population convince itself that elections are conducted fairly? Any change proposed in good faith is distorted by anyone who needs things to stay the way they are. Fear, uncertainty, doubt.
    - eesmith 5y ago
      No age limits, anyone (including non-citizens) can vote, and there's no registration system? And people can vote as many times as they want, in as many districts as the like? All of these are current state controlled processes which restrict the population from voting.
  - readthenotes1 5y ago
    It's a crime to vote in many countries without an id.
    - eesmith 5y ago
      How is that relevant? Is the argument that if country X does Y then Y isn't bad for the US? Belgium requires people carry id with them all the time. Does that mean the US should be like Belgium and require everyone carry id? Sweden requires either an id or someone with an id who can vouch for you, which is less strict than some of the US states. Most of those countries have a national id system. Why wouldn't that be a prerequisite for the US?
      - eindiran 5y ago
        It's relevant because considering what other people/places consider normal allows you to recontextualize and examine the frame you are in. The idea that IDs should be required for voting is only a hyper-politicized issue focused on race in the US, and noticing that lets you break your thinking outside that frame to some extent. Ultimately I am against anything requiring IDs, but so long as I need to show my ID and vaccine card to get seated at a restaurant in SF, it doesn't seem outlandish to me at all that elections should require IDs. Regarding national IDs, I'm not sure what you think this would look like but frankly that is the whole point of the REAL ID initiative which began in the wake of the Patriot Act reauthorization in 2005. Perhaps you have objections in light of the changes brought on by the REAL ID Modernization Act wherein the SSN requirements were significantly defanged, but IMO the point still remains.
        eesmith 5y ago
        The thing is, I'm aware about how voting is done outside of the US, at least to some extent. That doesn't explain how readthenotes1's comment is relevant. The amount of fraud in mail-in-voting is astoundingly low. Mandatory voter id doesn't seem to provide any benefits except for calming an artificial fear that was hyped just to pass mandatory id laws. I don't know why you say "focus on race" when the history shows that voter id requirements are there to elect Republicans, of which race is one correlated factor. Why can a gun license be used as valid id, but a state college id cannot? College students tend to vote for Democrats. Gun owners tend to vote Republican. Why do DMV offices (where you get ids) tend to close down in poor areas when there are cutbacks? Poor people tend to vote for Democrats. Now, if we really do look to other countries, we can ask why the DMV is in charge of issuing id. In at least some of those other countries, it is the police which are in charge of ids. So if we follow readthenotes1's suggestion see what other countries do, my point is that perhaps doing that correctly requires certain prerequisites that don't exist in the US. > so long as I need to show my ID and vaccine card to get seated at a restaurant in SF I didn't realize that getting seated at a restaurant was a constitutional right.
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
    When I voted by mail in California, the government sent me updates when my ballot was received and counted. If somebody was going around stealing identities to vote fraudulently, wouldn’t they be running the risk that every person they voted for could discover that a vote was cast in their name, triggering an investigation? Voter fraud is a serious crime, and unlike other similar crimes (like a fake credit application), the perpetrator doesn’t stand to make $$$$ for each act. They need to commit the crime at scale to change the result. If this form of fraud were happening en masse, surely there’d be tons of evidence of it? If campaign workers were going around trying to bribe people to vote, some of the people they are trying to bribe might unexpectedly be supporters of the other candidate, and would have a strong incentive to collect evidence of the bribery attempt and report it. It would make for some very interesting hidden camera videos and would be explosive news in the modern political environment.
    - Bancakes 5y ago
      They can use deceased people probably. I've heard of such cases in eastern europe for fraud.
      - fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
        There’s documentation when people die. Someone in could check and see that those people voted (in a somewhat automated way), then trigger an investigation where authorities look up what address were those ballots mailed to. Again, seems very risky (at least in the US where elections are litigated and governments are scrutinizing individual votes in close elections to find cases like this). I’m not saying it never happens, but rather that it’s easy enough to discover that people who do it have a decent change of getting caught. That constraints how widespread the issue can be.
        Bancakes 5y ago
        So assuming the scheme only works when everyone is in on it, would you be the one who reports it and gets punished and vilified? And who would you report it to? I'm not from thw US, and it brings a hopeful smile that conspiraces seem solvable over there.
  - krapp 5y ago
    >Is it such a crime to ask for id when you vote? It's not a crime, but the US government has proven that it can't be trusted not to be virulently racist when the opportunity to disenfranchise minority voters presents itself, particularly at the state level. ID requirements for voting are the equivalent of tempting a drunk with a shot of whiskey.
- eesmith 5y ago
  > fraud is possible The phrase "is possible" is so wishy-washy. It allows all sorts of movie plot scenarios which might have only 1-in-a-trillon odds. We've long experience with vote-by-mail. Including 20+ years of all-postal voting in Oregon. It's clear there is a very low incidence of fraud. We know this because there's a handful of cases where, say, one spouse filled out the ballot for a dead spouse. These can be detected by, for example, checking signatures. There is also a very low incident of fraud in in-person voting, as when someone own two homes and votes in two districts. So it's not like in-person-only voting is free of fraud. In neither case is the fraud significant - far less than Bush's FL lead of 537 votes over Gore in the 2000 election. Can we make up examples of how fraud might occur? Yes! The sergeant of overseas-deployed National Guard troops may require the soldiers to vote a certain way, and be able to verify the ballots before mailing them in. Now that you know fraud is possible that way, do you want to prevent overseas soldiers from voting? > any fraud would be immediately and obviously apparent. Open voting leads to a different type of fraud. "I don't rent to people who voted for X". "Anyone who doesn't vote for Y is fired." Just look at the history of the open ballot in American history to see how easy it is to corrupt. From A History of the Australian Ballot System in the United States at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_Australian_Ballot_System_in_the_United_States/Chapter_I https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_Australian_B... ] The failure of the law to secure secrecy opened the door to bribery, intimidation, and corruption. ] Money, or “soap,” as it was called, with increasing frequency was used to carry elections after the Civil War. ] It was charged that the bribery of voters in Indiana in 1880 and 1888 was sufficient to determine the result of the election. ] Intimidation was just as rife as bribery ] According to a report of a committee of the Forty-sixth Congress,[94] men were frequently marched or carried to the polls in their employers’ carriages. They were then supplied with ballots, and frequently compelled to hold their hands up with their ballots in them so they could easily be watched until the ballots were dropped into the box. Many labor men were afraid to vote and remained away from the polls. Others who voted against their employers’ wishes frequently lost their jobs. If the employee lived in a factory town, he probably lived in a tenement owned by the company, and possibly his wife and children worked in the mill. If he voted against the wishes of the mill-owners, he and his family were thrown out of the mill, out of the tenement, and out of the means of earning a livelihood The fraud was indeed so 'obviously apparent' that it "fill[ed] thoughtful citizens with disgust and anxiety. Many electors, aware that the corrupt element was large enough to be able to turn the election, held aloof altogether." Surely that's far worse than even nation-wide all-postal voting.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > If we don't want to restrict non-in-person voting back to how it was in 2016 In 2016, several states, including the largest, had either universal mail-in-voting or on-demand permanent-without-special-excuse absentee status, and that number had gone up for 2020 even before the response to COVID prompted some temporary and other permanent changes. So, what exactly do you mean by “restrict non-in-person voting back to how it was in 2016”?
Barrin92 5y ago
The counterargument that poll watchers themselves may be partisan seems vague. How does this not apply to anything? Maybe they manipulated the ballots, maybe they reported the wrong numbers etc.. There's always a bureaucratic apparatus involved in processing an election and mail voting doesn't strike me as particularly exceptional. Why does the author trust that the French civil service is non-partisan enough? Here in Germany mail voting works exactly like described, outer ballot verifies identity, inner ballot contains the vote. There are always, I believe nine people required to be present when the envelops are separated to check on each other. To believe there is a systemic, effort across countless of voting regions with different demographics seems kind of conspiratorial.
euroderf 5y ago
Coercion is in principle a valid concern. So like, make sure the local board of elections has an office open in the days before the election where any voter can come in, present ID, have their mail-in ballot destroyed, and cast a new ballot.
cryptonector 5y ago
Why was this flagged?
- tympious 5y ago
  Possibly because the notion of America having "abandoned the secret ballot" is hyperbolic at best. Also looks like the article was originally published here: https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/14/what-americans-lost-when-we-abandoned-the-secret-ballot/ https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/14/what-americans-lost-when-...
  - cryptonector 5y ago
    It's not really hyperbolic at all. Secrecy is now only preserved if the people handling the votes choose to preserve it. That's a big deal. Even if today they choose to preserve your ballot's secrecy, there is nothing now stopping them from violating that (and the law) in the future. It's important to wonder too how people will react -- do people now act as though they have no secrecy in their ballot? So, no, this should not have been flagged!
  - TheMonarchist 5y ago
    > Also looks like the article was originally published here: Actually there's editor's note in the end linking to the original RealClearPolitics article. Also the article I submitted says that it was first there, but less visibly and without link. There seems to be no way to change the url in retrospect.
    - cryptonector 5y ago
      Submit it again.
      - TheMonarchist 5y ago
        The new submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30080819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30080819

23 points by TheMonarchist 5y ago

IMO, right now we're in the worst of both worlds. The ballot is secret enough that fraud is possible, but non-secret enough that coercion is possible. If we don't want to restrict non-in-person voting back to how it was in 2016, then maybe we should make everyone's votes completely public. At least then, any fraud would be immediately and obviously apparent.

wefaewg 5y ago
Or you know you could just ask people for their id like they ask people for the vaccination status in SF. You have to have a id to drive a car. You have to have an id to buy alcohol. Is it such a crime to ask for id when you vote?
- josephcsible 5y ago
  I 100% agree we should ask for ID at polling places. But does that really do any good if everyone's allowed to vote by mail for no reason?
  - hansthehorse 5y ago
    ID is ok as long as it's stupid easy to obtain if you don't have what is the default national id drivers license. The faction that tries to suppress voting want voter ID so they can then restrict what ID is needed to get government issued ID without holding a drivers license. Voter ID isn't the issue, how to get the ID is. There is a solution though. Issue a national health card at birth with a requirement to have it reissued with a picture after age 18. So Medicare for all solves two issues. Health care and voter ID.
    - mbrumlow 5y ago
      Here is a site that I think was meant to show how bad it is, but could be condensed down if they wanted to actually help people. https://www.vote.org/voter-id-laws/ https://www.vote.org/voter-id-laws/ The info here seems to contradicts your statements, so if you don’t agree, don’t yell at me, talk to the site.
      - josephcsible 5y ago
        Requiring a copy of photo ID to be mailed is a joke. The entire point of photo ID is that you're supposed to make sure the picture on the ID matches the person who handed it to you.
  - anonymouse008 5y ago
    I still get a gear ground when I remember what little information it takes to request a ballot and how much information was leaked in Equifax.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  If you require ID to vote then you have a situation where the GOP has an incentive to make it more expensive and more hassle to get ID. Fuck that.
  - QuarterReptile 5y ago
    Hmm, a GOP conspiracy to make the DMV work poorly...
    - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
      The GOP was opposed to the motor voter law in the 90s because they didn’t want to have to nerf the DMVs?
- kingkawn 5y ago
  There shouldn’t be a state controlled process between the population and voting
  - watersb 5y ago
    In the true sense that the people are the state, a democracy would hold that the people can push through changes to the system that might not be in the interest of those who currently hold power under the very system the people are trying to change. And yet... how does a population convince itself that elections are conducted fairly? Any change proposed in good faith is distorted by anyone who needs things to stay the way they are. Fear, uncertainty, doubt.
  - eesmith 5y ago
    No age limits, anyone (including non-citizens) can vote, and there's no registration system? And people can vote as many times as they want, in as many districts as the like? All of these are current state controlled processes which restrict the population from voting.
- readthenotes1 5y ago
  It's a crime to vote in many countries without an id.
  - eesmith 5y ago
    How is that relevant? Is the argument that if country X does Y then Y isn't bad for the US? Belgium requires people carry id with them all the time. Does that mean the US should be like Belgium and require everyone carry id? Sweden requires either an id or someone with an id who can vouch for you, which is less strict than some of the US states. Most of those countries have a national id system. Why wouldn't that be a prerequisite for the US?
    - eindiran 5y ago
      It's relevant because considering what other people/places consider normal allows you to recontextualize and examine the frame you are in. The idea that IDs should be required for voting is only a hyper-politicized issue focused on race in the US, and noticing that lets you break your thinking outside that frame to some extent. Ultimately I am against anything requiring IDs, but so long as I need to show my ID and vaccine card to get seated at a restaurant in SF, it doesn't seem outlandish to me at all that elections should require IDs. Regarding national IDs, I'm not sure what you think this would look like but frankly that is the whole point of the REAL ID initiative which began in the wake of the Patriot Act reauthorization in 2005. Perhaps you have objections in light of the changes brought on by the REAL ID Modernization Act wherein the SSN requirements were significantly defanged, but IMO the point still remains.
      - eesmith 5y ago
        The thing is, I'm aware about how voting is done outside of the US, at least to some extent. That doesn't explain how readthenotes1's comment is relevant. The amount of fraud in mail-in-voting is astoundingly low. Mandatory voter id doesn't seem to provide any benefits except for calming an artificial fear that was hyped just to pass mandatory id laws. I don't know why you say "focus on race" when the history shows that voter id requirements are there to elect Republicans, of which race is one correlated factor. Why can a gun license be used as valid id, but a state college id cannot? College students tend to vote for Democrats. Gun owners tend to vote Republican. Why do DMV offices (where you get ids) tend to close down in poor areas when there are cutbacks? Poor people tend to vote for Democrats. Now, if we really do look to other countries, we can ask why the DMV is in charge of issuing id. In at least some of those other countries, it is the police which are in charge of ids. So if we follow readthenotes1's suggestion see what other countries do, my point is that perhaps doing that correctly requires certain prerequisites that don't exist in the US. > so long as I need to show my ID and vaccine card to get seated at a restaurant in SF I didn't realize that getting seated at a restaurant was a constitutional right.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
  When I voted by mail in California, the government sent me updates when my ballot was received and counted. If somebody was going around stealing identities to vote fraudulently, wouldn’t they be running the risk that every person they voted for could discover that a vote was cast in their name, triggering an investigation? Voter fraud is a serious crime, and unlike other similar crimes (like a fake credit application), the perpetrator doesn’t stand to make $$$$ for each act. They need to commit the crime at scale to change the result. If this form of fraud were happening en masse, surely there’d be tons of evidence of it? If campaign workers were going around trying to bribe people to vote, some of the people they are trying to bribe might unexpectedly be supporters of the other candidate, and would have a strong incentive to collect evidence of the bribery attempt and report it. It would make for some very interesting hidden camera videos and would be explosive news in the modern political environment.
  - Bancakes 5y ago
    They can use deceased people probably. I've heard of such cases in eastern europe for fraud.
    - fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
      There’s documentation when people die. Someone in could check and see that those people voted (in a somewhat automated way), then trigger an investigation where authorities look up what address were those ballots mailed to. Again, seems very risky (at least in the US where elections are litigated and governments are scrutinizing individual votes in close elections to find cases like this). I’m not saying it never happens, but rather that it’s easy enough to discover that people who do it have a decent change of getting caught. That constraints how widespread the issue can be.
      - Bancakes 5y ago
        So assuming the scheme only works when everyone is in on it, would you be the one who reports it and gets punished and vilified? And who would you report it to? I'm not from thw US, and it brings a hopeful smile that conspiraces seem solvable over there.
- krapp 5y ago
  >Is it such a crime to ask for id when you vote? It's not a crime, but the US government has proven that it can't be trusted not to be virulently racist when the opportunity to disenfranchise minority voters presents itself, particularly at the state level. ID requirements for voting are the equivalent of tempting a drunk with a shot of whiskey.
eesmith 5y ago
> fraud is possible The phrase "is possible" is so wishy-washy. It allows all sorts of movie plot scenarios which might have only 1-in-a-trillon odds. We've long experience with vote-by-mail. Including 20+ years of all-postal voting in Oregon. It's clear there is a very low incidence of fraud. We know this because there's a handful of cases where, say, one spouse filled out the ballot for a dead spouse. These can be detected by, for example, checking signatures. There is also a very low incident of fraud in in-person voting, as when someone own two homes and votes in two districts. So it's not like in-person-only voting is free of fraud. In neither case is the fraud significant - far less than Bush's FL lead of 537 votes over Gore in the 2000 election. Can we make up examples of how fraud might occur? Yes! The sergeant of overseas-deployed National Guard troops may require the soldiers to vote a certain way, and be able to verify the ballots before mailing them in. Now that you know fraud is possible that way, do you want to prevent overseas soldiers from voting? > any fraud would be immediately and obviously apparent. Open voting leads to a different type of fraud. "I don't rent to people who voted for X". "Anyone who doesn't vote for Y is fired." Just look at the history of the open ballot in American history to see how easy it is to corrupt. From A History of the Australian Ballot System in the United States at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_Australian_Ballot_System_in_the_United_States/Chapter_I https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_Australian_B... ] The failure of the law to secure secrecy opened the door to bribery, intimidation, and corruption. ] Money, or “soap,” as it was called, with increasing frequency was used to carry elections after the Civil War. ] It was charged that the bribery of voters in Indiana in 1880 and 1888 was sufficient to determine the result of the election. ] Intimidation was just as rife as bribery ] According to a report of a committee of the Forty-sixth Congress,[94] men were frequently marched or carried to the polls in their employers’ carriages. They were then supplied with ballots, and frequently compelled to hold their hands up with their ballots in them so they could easily be watched until the ballots were dropped into the box. Many labor men were afraid to vote and remained away from the polls. Others who voted against their employers’ wishes frequently lost their jobs. If the employee lived in a factory town, he probably lived in a tenement owned by the company, and possibly his wife and children worked in the mill. If he voted against the wishes of the mill-owners, he and his family were thrown out of the mill, out of the tenement, and out of the means of earning a livelihood The fraud was indeed so 'obviously apparent' that it "fill[ed] thoughtful citizens with disgust and anxiety. Many electors, aware that the corrupt element was large enough to be able to turn the election, held aloof altogether." Surely that's far worse than even nation-wide all-postal voting.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> If we don't want to restrict non-in-person voting back to how it was in 2016 In 2016, several states, including the largest, had either universal mail-in-voting or on-demand permanent-without-special-excuse absentee status, and that number had gone up for 2020 even before the response to COVID prompted some temporary and other permanent changes. So, what exactly do you mean by “restrict non-in-person voting back to how it was in 2016”?

Barrin92 5y ago

The counterargument that poll watchers themselves may be partisan seems vague. How does this not apply to anything? Maybe they manipulated the ballots, maybe they reported the wrong numbers etc.. There's always a bureaucratic apparatus involved in processing an election and mail voting doesn't strike me as particularly exceptional. Why does the author trust that the French civil service is non-partisan enough? Here in Germany mail voting works exactly like described, outer ballot verifies identity, inner ballot contains the vote. There are always, I believe nine people required to be present when the envelops are separated to check on each other. To believe there is a systemic, effort across countless of voting regions with different demographics seems kind of conspiratorial.

euroderf 5y ago

Coercion is in principle a valid concern. So like, make sure the local board of elections has an office open in the days before the election where any voter can come in, present ID, have their mail-in ballot destroyed, and cast a new ballot.

cryptonector 5y ago

Why was this flagged?

tympious 5y ago
Possibly because the notion of America having "abandoned the secret ballot" is hyperbolic at best. Also looks like the article was originally published here: https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/14/what-americans-lost-when-we-abandoned-the-secret-ballot/ https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/14/what-americans-lost-when-...
- cryptonector 5y ago
  It's not really hyperbolic at all. Secrecy is now only preserved if the people handling the votes choose to preserve it. That's a big deal. Even if today they choose to preserve your ballot's secrecy, there is nothing now stopping them from violating that (and the law) in the future. It's important to wonder too how people will react -- do people now act as though they have no secrecy in their ballot? So, no, this should not have been flagged!
- TheMonarchist 5y ago
  > Also looks like the article was originally published here: Actually there's editor's note in the end linking to the original RealClearPolitics article. Also the article I submitted says that it was first there, but less visibly and without link. There seems to be no way to change the url in retrospect.
  - cryptonector 5y ago
    Submit it again.
    - TheMonarchist 5y ago
      The new submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30080819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30080819