The right to vote according to your conscience, without fear of intimidation or interference, is one of the most fundamental ideas in American democracy. But you can’t do that without a totally secret ballot.
That’s why we must prohibit people from taking pictures of their marked ballots and then posting them online. Anyone has the right to tell people who they voted for, but showing the actual marked ballot is an entirely different matter because it offers proof.
In the 19th century, vote buying was common. In fact, it’s estimated that 10 to 15 percent of all votes cast in the late 19th century were bought and paid for. Showing a marked ballot that proved who you had voted for was often how people claimed their payment.
To solve this problem, a series of laws were passed in the 1880s and 1890s requiring the government (rather than political parties) to print ballots and prohibiting people from revealing marked ballots. But if we once again make it legal for voters to show an actual marked ballot to someone else, that would open the door to voter coercion—and possibly outright vote buying.
Even today, some people face pressures to change their votes—from an employer, from a union, or even from a spouse. If anyone asks you to provide proof of how you voted, you should be able to tell them that taking a picture is illegal, and you can’t do it.
The bottom line is that anything that compromises privacy at the ballot box is a step in a very dangerous direction. Some of the most feared dictators of the 20th century—including Hitler, Stalin, and Saddam Hussein—forced people to vote in sham elections with ballots that could easily be traced to specific voters.
I have been New Hampshire’s top election official for 40 years, and in that time, I have seen how passionately many people feel about voting. When we step into that voting booth, the poorest of us has the same power as the richest of us. We cannot jeopardize the sanctity of that.
—WILLIAM GARDNER,
New Hampshire Secretary of State