Voting technology has changed greatly in recent years, leading to problems with accuracy and auditability. These are important, but another trend has gotten less attention: the gradual erosion of the secret ballot.
It’s useful to distinguish two separate conceptions of the secret ballot. Let’s define weak secrecy to mean that the voter has the option of keeping his ballot secret, and strong secrecy to mean that the voter is forced to keep his ballot secret. To put it another way, weak secrecy means the ballot is secret if the voter cooperates in maintaining its secrecy; strong secrecy means the ballot is secret even if the voter wants to reveal it.
The difference is important. No system can stop a voter from telling somebody how he voted. But strong secrecy prevents the voter from proving how he voted, whereas weak secrecy does not rule out such a proof. Strong secrecy therefore deters vote buying and coercion, by stopping a vote buyer from confirming that he is getting what he wants – a voter can take the payment, or pretend to knuckle under to the coercion, while still voting however he likes. With weak secrecy, the buyer or coercer can demand proof.
In theory, our electoral system is supposed to provide strong secrecy, as a corrective to an unfortunate history of vote buying and coercion. But in practice, our system provides only weak secrecy.
The main culprit is voting by mail. A mail-in absentee ballot is only weakly secret, the voter can mark and mail the ballot in front of a third party, or the voter can just give the blank ballot to the third party to be filled out. Any voter who wants to reveal his vote can request an absentee ballot. (Some states allow absentee voting only for specific reasons, but in practice people who are willing to sell their votes will also be willing to lie about their justification for absentee voting.)
Strong secrecy seems to require the voter to cast his ballot in a private booth, which can only be guaranteed at an officially run polling place.
The trend toward voting by mail is just one of the forces eroding the secret ballot. Some e-voting technologies fail to provide even weak secrecy, for example by recording ballots in the order they were cast, thereby allowing officials or pollwatchers who record the order of voters’ appearance (as happens in many places) to connect each recorded vote to a voter.
Worse yet, even if a complex voting technology does protect secrecy, this may do little good if voters aren’t confident that the system really protects them. If everybody “knows” that the party boss can tell who votes the wrong way, the value of secrecy will be lost no matter what the technology does. For this reason, the trend toward complex black-box technologies may neutralize the benefits of secrecy.
If secrecy is being eroded, we can respond by trying to restore it, or we can decide instead to give up on secrecy or fall back to weak secrecy. Merely pretending to enforce strong secrecy looks like a recipe for bad policy.
(Thanks to Alex Halderman and Harlan Yu for helpful conversations on this topic.)
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