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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."
LOL!
It seems that everywhere in the world, governments and corporations have decided that because we have the technology, it's okay to use it to abuse people's rights and freedoms in ways that would be illegal if they were done in person, or on paper.
Obviously, just barcode the people. It will make things much easier for admin.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
The fundamental problem is that lack of anonymity creates pressure to change one's vote not due to one's personal beliefs, but rather due to pressure from an outcome of what another might think. In the extreme case, we are talking potential retaliation by a regime or political part. This has happened repeatedly through history, and happens today. While the extreme case doesn't appear to apply in the US today, in pre-WW II German, it did. If civilized countries can change quickly to oppress, then how, if our inherent right to vote does not come with an obvious need for protections such as anonymity, can our constitution protect us indefinitely?
Don't eliminate identifying marks if you can download an app to decode the mark into a number, then run an algorythm against it to transform the number into names, and figure out how that individual voted.
Which they did.
On a local radio station.
With a county comissioners barcode, they told him how he voted.
This should be interesting seeing how Colorado is voting this year to legalize marijuana...
From the article and it's referenced information, namely Secretary of State Scott Gessler's guidelines on the matter, ballots were to include limited identifying marks to ensure that the same ballot would not be counted twice when votes were tabulated, but that individuals would not have their ball it's unique identifier linked to their voter registration.
What is changing here is that rather than a human-readable number, a barcode-only solution will be used for verification purposes to increase the difficulty of an individual vote being traced to a person.
The fact that Gessler's also identified multiple illegal immigrants who had voted in the former Colorado election through voter registration searches is irrelevant to the situation at hand.
Thirty four characters live here.
The whole purpose of a paper ballot is to keep your vote secret. If that was not the case you could far more easily went in and say your choice aloud.
If you take the time to learn what information is actually on the ballot you'll see that the lawsuit has no merit. The barcode relates the ballot to what was scanned when the vote was automatically tallied in case there are errors or a recount. Any possibility that the ballot could be linked back to an individual voter was speculation, the plaintiffs couldn't produce any evidence that it could actually happen.
The world of Constitutional Law was rocked today by an anonymous posting on the well known geek website, Slashdot. In a few eloquent lines, an anonymous coward swept away centuries of misguided thought and ushered in a new era in constitutional thought. "I'm blown away," said Chief Justice Roberts. "My life has been wasted." Other members of the court could not be reached for comment.
[FUCK BETA]
So the big concern I have is how these barcodes work. Are they public? Are they encrypted? And what I mean by encrypted is if the value is scrambled to link back to the original voter.
Merely being able to be traced back to an individual voter is bad enough. No matter whether it's encrypted, hashed, etc. No trace back of vote to voter should be possible.
The reason I feel like this is unfortunately necessary is that it would be easy to sneak
in votes that had just some barcode if it didn't have to be decrypted and validated.
That can ALWAYS happen. That is why you need honest people in your election committee, and oversight. Allow before the election everyone who wants to see that a ballot box is empty, subsequently locked, and then that each voter can put one and only one paper in it. Keep on following this ballot box until it's opened and the votes are counted. Match total number of votes with total voters (knowing who voted is fine, you need to know that to prevent multiple votes by a single person). Have two opposing parties do this, add maybe an independent observer, and the risk of fraud is low without identification. That's how it's done.
No situation is perfect, but over the years we have come up with pretty good ways of making sure elections are done fairly. Non-traceable votes are key to that.
My suggestion would be to give users a randomly generated number that is then one way hashed with their SSN. Then that information can be published online and anyone can take their autogenerated number and plug it into the hash with their SSN. If they fear retaliation or if they fear their boss might demand the number from them to check on them, they can merely opt for the official to destroy their number.
"So you destroyed that number and you can't show who you voted for? That must mean you did not vote for the party I told you to vote for."
Again, NO TRACE BACK should be possible. Period.
Some skimming around the internet on this subject is fairly interesting. Australia was the first country to implement the secret ballot in 1850, largely to curtail intimidation and other election day shennanigans that were used to influence elections. All elections in the US were secret ballot by the 1892 presidential election. However, this article in the Atlantic argues that the surest way to increase turnout is by making voting a matter of public record. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/abolish-the-secret-ballot/309038/
- Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Paper #84
Or even the Declaration of Independence:
Bonus points for reading political philosophy.
-Thomas Paine
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Anonymous ballots do NOT let you wote 100 times. When I vote, they cross my name off from the list of voters. So I can't vote again. The ballot is anonymous though - or it would be if I took care not to leave fingerprints.
She said that even if a ballot could be traced back to a specific voter, it doesn't show that a person's voting rights were violated, saying there was no "fundamental right" to a secret vote in the U.S. Constitution.
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.
Give out a tax rebate to everyone who votes. $100 should suffice.
The U.S.A. is a free country, we do not require Identity Papers. I did not have a drivers license until age 33 and lived my whole life just fine. For you to say that I would be required to carry identity papers, would be to say that I live as a slave in a totalitarian government. I only carry my drivers license when driving, and only show it to a police officer in regards to a driving offense. That is all it is to be used for.
I was under the impression that the United States practiced secret voting as specified under the Bill of Rights or the Constitution but apparently its just a method, it was known as "Australian Voting" in the 1800's, and its not specified under any of our foundation documents, as far as I can tell. Should be I think. I can't envision a strong democracy without it. Its been practiced here in all the jurisdictions I've ever voted in.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
If these were health, safety, or environmental regulations republicans would be screaming that the cost of implementing the regulations is a waste of tax dollars, that citizens have to be reimbursed for the "takings" (lost income, expenses) these regulations forced them to incur, and overall would blather about the rules being another example of intrusive big government. They would go on to say that any effect of improper voting is speculative and demand to see evidence of actual harm (thrown elections) before allowing any such regulations.
Amazing how republicans' math skills invert if you switch from talking about arsenic in drinking water to improper voting.
The term "Democratic" and its various forms can legitimately mean two different things:
1) An entity in which all decisions are made by popular vote.
2) An entity in which the government is highly accountable to the governed and, implicitly, in which those who govern are easily replaced by the governed in a democratic (meaning #1 above, by popular vote) manner.
An entity can be very democratic in the first sense even if one major decision - who will chair meetings - is not done democratically. If the person who chairs meetings is basically a figurehead with no real power, then not much harm is done in not having him elected.
An entity can be mostly democratic in the second sense even if no decisions other than electing who will govern are made by the governed.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
In George W. Bush's home state of Texas, voter-ID laws are on hold in part because dozens of counties have NO place to get a driver's license or photo ID card. Everyone in those counties has to drive to the next county to get one.
Voter registration can be done by mail, which is a much lower burden on those with no car or who work basically the same hours as the DMV office is open.
By the way, the impact on minorities is not BECAUSE they are minorities, but because being a minority is, for now at least, highly correlated to being poor, lacking good access to transportation, and other impediments to getting to the DMV office to get a photo ID or drivers license. If poverty and lack of access to good transportation were both uniformly distributed over ethnic and racial groups and other "minority" groups, then voter-ID laws would still hurt the poor and those without access to good transportation, but it would not have a disproportionate effect on any particular racial or ethnic group.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"Hell its Coke VS Pepsi!"
This is so wrong it's offensive. You need to get your facts in order before you say such absurd things.
The manufacturers of Coke and Pepsi are in competition.
We're never goig to get anywhere with them through voting. I think we should apply anti-trust legislation to them. Did you know that they own the debates? Together (yes, they work together on it) they manage and own the "presidential debates" we see on TV. It used to be run by the league of women voters, but the two parties, who share power and whose only real enemy is a third party, leveraged it away from them. You cannot have another voice in the discussion. Hell, you cannot even have a discussion.
http://people.howstuffworks.com/debate3.htm
The reason you're wrong is this isn't Coke vs. Pepsi at all. It's Coke vs. Coke in a collectable can.