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 Out of a desire to make voting “easier” and perhaps exaggerated
fears of public gatherings during the pandemic, most U.S. jurisdictions
permitted unrestricted mail-in balloting in 2020. What did Americans lose when
ballot secrecy was attenuated or vanished altogether?
Make no mistake, ballot secrecy is incompatible with secure mail-in balloting.
At the polls, we each go into a little booth and make our choices in private. By
contrast, no one knows where a mail-in ballot was filled out, or if a party or
union activist hovered over the voter or even filled in the circles. Nobody
knows what inducements, whether cash or threats, were offered to ensure that the
person voted “correctly.” And if the ballot was “harvested” – turned in to the
vote-counters by activists instead of by voters themselves – our suspicions
deepen.
To verify that a mail-in-voter is entitled to cast a ballot and
has done so only once, the vote counters who are legally entitled to open the
envelope need to know who signed the outside. True, one can physically separate
verification of voters’ identity by sending each voter two envelopes – an outer
one for the person to sign and an inner one in which the voter places the
filled-out ballot. In the vote-counting room, one set of workers can verify the
voter’s identity at one table, destroy the outer envelopes, and give the inner
envelopes containing the ballot to another set of workers, who then open those
inner envelopes and tabulate the votes. As long as everybody follows these
rules, ballot secrecy is preserved, even with mail-in balloting.
But in the United States, the secretaries of state who have ultimate
responsibility for state and federal elections are partisan officials; county
officials are partisan officials, too, and many of their permanent staff are
members of partisan public employees’ unions. Even when poll watchers from both
parties are present, in heavily blue cities the nominal Republican machinery is
often controlled by those who control the Democratic machinery. Back in the
early 1990s, I worshiped in the same South Chicago synagogue as the Democratic
ward committeeman. One day, he turned to another fellow worshiper, a staunch
Republican, and offered to make him the GOP ward committeeman. “Don’t worry,”
the Democratic committeeman reassured the other fellow, “my wife and I will fill
out all the papers and do all the work.”
Was the Democratic committeeman’s offer 100% kosher? Was his
only concern to have an intelligent and politically astute Republican colleague
in the ward? Permit me my doubts. The Democratic committeeman’s decades of
political activism subsequently came to an end when he was caught in a
false-flag dirty trick putting up anti-Semitic posters to attack his own
candidate. Presumably, the committeeman’s offer to our fellow congregant was
made in the same Chicago spirit that motivated him to put up those posters.
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Any of those vote-counting workers or party
officials may discover how you voted and give that information to
those who will use it against you at work or at school, possibly
with the help of the highly partisan staff at big tech companies
like Google and Facebook. If you think nothing like that could
happen – if you think that the laws that forbid that kind of thing
are generally enforced – remember that we have seen people harmed by
illegal or unethical releases of public records, with the victims
generally on the political side of Jack Ryan or Joe the Plumber, and
the perpetrators suffering no criminal or civil penalty.
In most democracies, mail-in voting is severely restricted or
nonexistent. It is nonexistent in France, for example, where
elections are conducted by a civil service so electorally
nonpartisan that it seems indifferent to democracy, having
faithfully served heads of state as diverse as Nazi collaborator
Marshal Petain, republican Charles de Gaulle, socialist François
Mitterrand, and Rothschild & Co. banker Emmanuel Macron. In Israel,
mail-in-voting is restricted to diplomats posted abroad and those on
active military duty – and in the 1950s, when David Ben-Gurion’s
Israel Workers’ Party controlled the government and the civil
service alike, high-ranking Army officers had their mail-in ballots
opened and their vote recorded by the secret police. Keep in mind
that, while the Israeli secret police once gathered and used
information only on a few VIPs, Big Data now has that information on
everybody.
So yes, as a professional political scientist, I
miss Election Day, the physically isolated voting booth, and the
private casting of ballots. The secret ballot was devised in the
19th century to prevent intimidation or bribery by neighbors,
employers, and party activists – and it worked. Now that unbribed,
unintimidated voting no longer serves the purposes of one American
political party and the corporate and class interests that that
party favors, the secret ballot seems as dead as the whistle-stop
campaign.
For the sake of our democracy, let’s hope I’m wrong.
Michael S. Kochin is professor extraordinarius in the School of
Political Science, Government, and International Relations at Tel
Aviv University. With Michael Taylor, he is the author of “An
Independent Empire: Diplomacy & War in the Making of the United
States, 1776-1826” (University of Michigan Press). This piece
originally ran at RealClearPolitics.
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