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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...
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]
- 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
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.
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.
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.