The other major problem with modern balloting procedures

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Paul Levy <plevy () citizen org>
Date: October 31, 2004 1:32:17 PM EST
To: dave () farber net
Subject: The other major problem with modern balloting procedures

With all the attention that is being paid to the problems of electronic
voting and attempts to discourage minority voting, another major problem
with voting is being ignored – the decline of the secret ballot.

For the past few times that I have gone to vote at my local precinct
here in Washington, DC, I have been troubled by the fact that I can not
longer cast my ballot secretly.  Yes, elaborate measures are taken to
allow me to MARK my ballot secretly.  I am given a large card for
optical scanning, along with a large envelope into which the ballot fits
securely.  I take both items over to a polling booth.  The arrangement
is not perfect – there are many booths sitting side by side, separated
by partitions that rise a couple of feet over the podium on which I mark
the ballot.  Not as secret as the voting machines that I remember from
my youth, when voters walked into a tall, freestanding booth and pulled
the curtain closed behind them – the same lever that prepares the
machine to accept a new voter's choices, and then casts the ballot on
the mechanical voting machine, also closed the curtain behind the voter,
and then opened the curtain behind the voter.  But the bulk of the
voter's body fills the back of the booth and, except for short people,
serves to conceal the ballot marking process from curious eyes.  Then I
slip the ballot into the secret ballot envelope, and walk it over to the
scanning machine that accepts the ballot from me.

At this point, however, secrecy ends.  In order to cast the ballot, I
have to remove it entirely from the secret ballot envelope, and insert
it into the scanner.   An elections official watches me while I do this,
and watches the card as it fees into the machine.  If the card doesn’t
feed in smoothly, the official helps manipulate the card until it does.
It has always seemed to me that, if the official chose to do so, she
could see exactly how I was voting.  I have complained about this
process at my local precinct, but nobody treats the loss of secrecy as a
serious problem.

Surely it must be possible to design these scanners, and the
accompanying envelopes, in a way that protects secrecy better.  Perhaps
the scanner could have a large "lip" into which the envelope and a
slightly protruding voter card slips, so that, as the card feeds into
the machine, nobody can see how it has been voted.  Or, cards could be
voted only on one side (use two cards if need be), so that they can be
fed into the scanner upside down, if the scanner were designed to take
the cards that way.

My concern was heightened by a report that I received from a friend who
has been participating in the early voting process in a state with a
closely contested election.  She mentioned that she had a way of
figuring out what fraction of the vote was being cast for her favored
candidate in the voting place to which she had been assigned.  How did
she know this?  Well, it’s the same problem I have had here in DC.

In that state, as in DC, the voter marks the optical scanning card in
secrecy, and feeds the card into the scanning machine.  But there is an
elections worker there to watch – accompanied by my friend in her
capacity as poll watcher.  My friend tells me that the official is there
because the machine malfunctions about 10% of the time, usually because
the voter has failed to hold the card straight while feeding it into the
scanner.  My friend further explains that someone standing by can easily
focus his eyes on one or two lines and see how the citizen has voted in
a particular race.  And, says my friend, she herself needed to observe a
function that was in the same sight line as the ballot feeding into the
machine, so try as she did to avert her eyes, she couldn't help noticing
how individual ballots were being cast.

Now, I am a big boy, I am economically independent of the power
structure here in DC, and except as a matter of principle I don’t care
whether some elections official can see how I have voted.  And, as a
practical matter, voters have nothing to worry about from my friend, who
has traveled to a precinct far from her own home (problems not so great
in her hometown), so she doesn’t know the voters there and hence has
no mechanism for translating what she has learned into retaliation
against those who vote wrong.  But this is more of a problem when local
party workers know the electors, where competition for posts is partisan
enough that consequences may be visited on those who vote wrong.  For
example, in the Long Island town where I grew up, the Republican machine
was widely needed for favors, whether it be zoning variances or summer
jobs for your kids, and people engaged in open shows of support for
candidates as needed to protect their access to political favors.  If
the ballot hadn't been secret, the Democratic reformers would never have
been able to pull off even the smallest victories.

And, even more significant is the danger that some voters may be
intimidated into supporting the candidates that they believe the local
power structure wants them to support, because the circumstances of the
balloting are such that they cannot be confident that their electoral
choices are being made in secret.


Paul Alan Levy
Public Citizen Litigation Group
1600 - 20th Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20009
(202) 588-1000
http://www.citizen.org/litigation/litigation.html

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