We must protect the secret ballot

Why do we have the secret ballot and how does it affect our voting system? Americans hold the secret ballot to be an essential right at the heart of the voting system, and key voting practices are shaped by the right to a secret ballot. Today, I will discuss, first, how the secret ballot arose in America. Second, how the secret ballot is in tension with other aspects of our voting system, and third, how Americans can preserve this important feature of a voting going into the future. First, the right to a secret ballot sounds so fundamental that many imagine that it has been with us since the beginning of a republic and enshrined in our Constitution. In fact, neither is true. Voting at the beginning of our Republic was generally public. In some cases, voters announced their votes allowed or viva voce.

In other cases, the voter might be required to vote a ballot, which usually meant writing a name on a piece of paper, and that act of voting was mostly public, and the voters name was often on the ballot. As voting expanded in the 19th century and as party bosses and party machines developed extensive roots in local communities, some reformers saw a flaw in these very public forms of voting. In the more extreme cases, local party leaders gave voters color coded ballots to cast. They might be deposited in a glass jar so that everyone could see the party that the voters supported, and the reward for voting the correct way might be money or favors, even plum patronage jobs in city government might be rewarded to voters who voted the party line for all to see a worldwide movement for secret ballot reform began in the middle of the 19th century. It is sometimes referred to as the Australian ballot reform, as it began in Australia and spread to Great Britain, America and the rest of the world. In America, the movement picked up steam in the last two decades of the 19th century. It was not a federal reform, but almost all of the states adopted it, and many even enshrined in their state constitutions that there was a right for voters to cast a secret ballot. The protections differed a bit from state to state, but two key features were one, that government would produce an official ballot. Voters could no longer bring ballots that they or their political parties had created, and two that there should be some form of voting booth or privacy curtain that would prevent others from seeing how the voter voted. The second part of our story is that these important secret ballot reforms often came into conflict with other aspects of our voting system. One area where the tension has been noticed for a long time is with respect to absentee or mail voting. Not long after states had adopted strong laws and even state constitutional provisions requiring a sacred ballot, states also began to experiment with providing an absentee ballot to an increasingly mobile population who might be away from the polling place on Election Day.

There had been some absentee voting and a large experiment for soldiers during the Civil War, but the start of the 20th century was the point where states wanted to offer absentee voting to some needy people, while at the same time preserving the privacy and secrecy of the ballot that they had instituted in the 20 or 30 years prior. How can you keep the ballot secret? If you send a ballot away from the polling place to a voter who might have the eyes of his spouse, Commander, church or employer, it is not a fully secret ballot if perhaps someone else can see how the voter voted, or even possibly coerce them, as political bosses had done in the 19th century. And especially, how do you preserve the secret ballot that was enshrined as a right in many state constitutions? The answer at that time was to limit the use of absentee ballots to people who really needed them, who would be unable to make it to the polling place on Election Day and at the same time, require witness or even the signature of a notary public, who could swear that the voter cast the ballot privately and without coercion from anyone else.

The first time I voted in a federal election, I was away from home, out of state at college, I had to request a ballot from my hometown. I then brought the blank ballot to my college registrar, who was a notary public, and then I was asked to fill out the ballot nearby without her seeing my selections, put the ballot in an accompanying envelope, and then have her sign and attest to the fact that I voted it privately. This was the best way that states found to be able to send out a ballot away from the protections of the polling place, but still ensure that the voter cast the vote privately and without coercion. Many years later, in the late 1970s a number of states in the West started to view these regulations as burdensome to voters. They allowed all voters to cast. Ballots without a reason. They stripped away the witness and Notary Public requirements, and they moved to mailing ballots to everyone and to a system where nearly all people vote by mail.

There was a great variation in the way states vote, but quite a few have moved in this direction. They have forgotten about the privacy protections of early eras, seeing a system of convenience as important to voters. Fortunately, we are not in an era like that of the corrupt city bosses of the 19th century. So fraud and coercion are not widespread, but it would still be good to recognize that there may be small pockets of people who might have someone else look at their ballots or subtly or unsubtly pressure their vote. Other tensions include states that prohibit ballot selfies or taking a picture of your filled out ballot, or the controversies of our ballot harvesting. Some think it’s a convenience for voters to have someone else deliver their ballot.

Others want to limit the people who could handle your ballot, and in general, auditing the vote is difficult because all ballots, even absentee ballots, once removed from the envelopes, are placed in a large pile, and no one can then determine who voted a particular ballot. The secret ballot is an important value that American voters cherish. It is in tension with other values such as ease of voting or the need to audit our vote counts. There’s no perfect system of voting, but whether it is insisting on privacy booths at the polling place, or limiting some of the dangers of coercion of voters who cast their ballots outside the polling place, it is important not to forget this long cherished voter protection the.