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Federal Judge Says No Right To Secret Ballot, OKs Barcoded Ballots
doug141 writes "A Colorado county put bar codes on printed ballots in a last minute effort to comply with a rule about eliminating identifying markings. Citizens sued, because the bar codes can still be traced back to individual voters. In a surprise ruling, Denver U.S. District Judge Christine Arguello said the U.S. Constitution did not contain a 'fundamental right' to secret ballots, and that the citizens could not show their voting rights had been violated, nor that they might suffer any specific injury from the bar codes."
It's an often repeated argument, but it is not correct nevertheless.
A structure is democratic if it provides the means to remove the ruling entity from power without bloodshed or revolution. So a republic can be democratic, if it's possible to remove the rulers of the republic form power using means provided in the constitution of the republic. A republic gets more and more undemocratic if it gets more and more complicated to legally remove someone from power, be it, because the laws build more and more hurdles to do so, or because traditions get more and more entrenched and any changes are frowned upon, or if a group within the structure is completely removed from power.
There is no Constitutional right to a secret ballot.
In the State of Oregon, all voting is done by absentee ballot. There's no privacy screen around you as you cast your vote. Your employer can stop by and say, "I'll pay you $1000 for your unused ballot, so I can fill it out how I want and submit it." If you're in an abusive family, your domineering alcoholic bipolar parent might force you to fill out the absentee ballot in front of them so they can control how you vote. There is no way the absentee ballot is considered a secret ballot, and yet we have no trouble when an entire state converts to voting by absentee ballot.
The State of West Virginia guarantees, in its state constitution, every resident's right to cast a public ballot. There's no mention of the secret ballot.
The secret ballot wasn't in use anywhere in the United States until it was first adopted by the city of Louisville, Kentucky, in 1888. The State of Massachusetts followed soon after. The first President to be elected by secret ballot was Grover Cleveland, in 1892.
We didn't use secret ballots to elect Washington, Jefferson, Jackson or Lincoln.
So, yeah. Anyone who claims we have a constitutional right to a secret ballot has an uphill road to hoe. History clearly shows that at no point in our nation's history has any court held the secret ballot to be a right.
In Oregon (which is 100% vote by mail), there is also a bar code on the mailing envelope. You sign the mailing envelope and your signature is verified against the one on file. The bar code is not a problem however because your actual ballot is in a separate "secrecy" envelope that you put inside the mailing envelope. There are no identifying marks on the secrecy envelope or the ballot itself. At the elections office one person verifies your signature, marks the record that you have voted, and takes the secrecy envelope out of the mailing envelope. The secrecy envelope is placed in a big box. Next, someone else take the big box, extracts the ballots from the secrecy envelopes and feeds the ballots into a scanner (they are "bubble sheet" ballots), where they are tallied. Representatives from the political parties and the public are encouraged to watch the process in person.
For those that don't like the concept of paying postage to vote, there are a wide variety of locations where you can hand deliver your ballot.
For those not in the US, Oregon is a state in the Northwest portion of the country.
It's ironic that conservatives complain about poor, elderly, and disabled people and all their "entitlements," all while acting completely oblivious to how ridiculously entitled they act themselves. " I have no trouble taking time off work to drive my car over to the local DMV, which is open six days a week, and showing them all the paperwork my parents and I stored safely in a fireproof filing cabinet since the day I was born. How could it not be that easy for everyone else??"
Many poor people work shit jobs (often TWO shit jobs). For some of these, "hey boss, I've got to take a day off" risks being interpreted as "hey boss, I'm a lazy fuck, fire me hire someone else to wash these dishes." And regardless, for all of them taking a day off work is a day with no pay - and that is no small cost to someone living on tiny margins.
I already hear you getting indignant. But getting an ID at the DMV doesn't take a full day! For you, with your open-six-days-a-week suburban DMV, sure. For you, who can hop into your own car and drive straight there, sure. Many of the poor, elderly, and disabled can't do that; they have to take public transportation (if available in their area; for rural areas this isn't even an option), find someone else to drive them (does that person have to take work off too?), or hire a taxi. In many areas (particularly rural), the DMV is quite a distance away, or is only open four, or two, or 1 day(s) a month (requiring either an expensive multi-hour drive into the city, or dealing with long waits on the few days it is open).
And having the requisite paperwork at hand isn't the easiest thing for everyone, either. Sure, your parents made sure to keep track of your birth certificate for you; by the time you were 5 your parents got you a passport, at 16 you had a driver's license. You became an adult with a wealth of well-organized paperwork defining who you are. Not everyone has that advantage. Some people have no idea where their birth certificates went; some people never got birth certificates at all, either because their parents didn't handle paperwork properly, or because they were born in a time when such things weren't even available (ie. elderly in rural areas). Most poor people don't get passports for obvious reasons. Many don't have licenses either, if they cannot afford cars (poor), are incapable of driving (disabled/elderly), or have no need to drive (elderly). Some do have birth certificates, but ones that are no longer valid (pretty much every Puerto Rican in this country). Some have ID, but that ID is for various reasons not considered valid under the law (others in this thread have described those already). Getting an ID without already having the requisite paperwork in order is orders of magnitude harder, and requires many more fees and many more days off work to stand in lines at different government offices.
What it boils down to is this: Do these laws help more than they hurt? This country has had (iirc) about a hundred documented cases of in-person voter fraud in the past decade. A hundred. In ten years. There are literally millions of registered voters with no government-issued ID. For your argument's sake, let's assume voter fraud is 100x what it is (10,000) and that only 1/100th of the un-IDed registered voters (10,000) are going to be unable to get IDs due to various hardships: at that point, with everything heavily skewed in your favor, we barely break even in the number-of-affected-votes statistic, and that is after making the poor, disabled, and elderly jump through a bunch of time consuming and expensive hoops.
It is clear to anyone with even half a brain that this is not about insuring the integrity of the voting process, since in will clearly disenfranchise far more people than it will stop from committing fraud. It's about intentionally disenfranchising the poor, who tend to vote Democrat.
And Republicans are happy to admit it.