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SCOTUS Rules Petiton Signatures Are Public Record
Reader SheeEttin reminds us that back in October, the Supreme Court accepted a case testing whether or not petition signers' names could be kept anonymous. (The premise was that the act of signing a petition is covered by free speech, and thus signers are entitled to anonymity, especially to protect them from harassment.) Now the Court has issued its ruling: signatures are part of the public record. "By a strong majority Thursday, the Supreme Court issued a setback for opponents of gay marriage who wanted to keep their identities secret. The justices favored transparency over privacy in a case testing whether signing a petition is a public act. The case began with a bill that the Washington state legislature passed in 2009, expanding the state's domestic partnership law. The new referendum was known as 'everything but marriage' for the enhanced rights it gave same-sex couples. People who opposed the bill gathered 120,000 signatures for a ballot measure asking voters to repeal it. That measure eventually reached Washington voters, who upheld 'everything but marriage.' Those who signed the repeal petition feared that they would be harassed if their names became public, so they went to court challenging Washington's Public Records Act. They argued that signing a petition is speech that is protected from disclosure. But in Thursday's 8-1 ruling, the Supreme Court disagreed. 'Such disclosure does not, as a general matter, violate the first amendment,' Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court."
The argument against disclosure of personally identifiable voting records is that disclosing the vote record would allow a party to verify that a paid shill voted the way they were asked to.
The record of who voted is already public record. If somebody who is not qualified to vote did so, you can't undo their vote, but if you found enough such misvotes you might be able to challenge the entire election. You could also pressure the government to prosecute the voter.
No, he's saying you can get a record of *who* voted, not *how* they voted. Accordingly if you can find enough examples of invalid voters voting (without knowing how they voted) that it may have made an impact on the election, you can potentially have the election overturned and redone.