The big question touching a nerve this election: "Can my husband find out who I am voting for?"

ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net to News@lemmy.world – 520 points – "Can my husband find out who I am voting for?": The big question touching a nerve this election
salon.com

Can my husband find out who I am voting for in the Presidential Election?"

Olivia Dreizen Howell, the founder of a website to help women get back on their feet after a breakup or divorce, tweeted last week, "We've been getting this question a lot," so she followed up with some facts. As the Washington Post confirmed with experts, the answer is simple: "No; it will be public record that you voted, but not how you filled out your ballot."

The GOP ticket is led by a sexual predator who a jury found "'raped' [journalist E. Jean Carroll] as many people commonly understand the word 'rape,'" the judge in the case wrote. His running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, has called for a national abortion ban, wrote the forward to a book that denounced contraception for making pregnancy "seem like an optional and not natural result of having sex," and repeatedly called women who haven't given birth "sociopathic" and "childless cat ladies."

Meanwhile, the Democratic ticket is led by a woman who chose "Freedom" by Beyoncé as her campaign song, and has dispensed with the mealy-mouthed language about abortion rights to declare she stands for "the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body." Her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, her running mate, has decried "weird" MAGA Republicans of the "he-man woman haters’ club."

122

You are viewing a single comment
View all commentsShow the parent comment

Yes, that is California. In the exact same paragraph, other states are listed which don't offer the option. Oregon was the one that came to my mind immediately.

The issue is, having an option to do something the right way is not all that helpful. If there is an option to do it the wrong way, attackers (using "attacker" in the sense of computer security) will do what they can to make you use that option, so they can exploit it. Therefore, security systems should make doing the wrong thing impossible, rather than merely making the right thing possible.

You're correct, I should have been more thorough.

Here's one of the sources cited by that Wikipedia article:

Mostly-Mail Elections (aka Vote-by-Mail, All-Mail or Vote-at-Home Elections) What Are Mostly-Mail Elections? In mostly-mail elections, all registered voters are sent a ballot through the mail. The voter marks the ballot, puts it in a secrecy sleeve or envelope if required, places it in a separate mailing envelope, signs an affidavit on the exterior of the mailing envelope or otherwise provides verification of their identify and then returns the ballot via mail or by dropping it off at an approved return location.

Ballots are mailed out well ahead of Election Day, and thus voters have an “election period,” not just a single day, to vote. Mostly-mail elections can be thought of as absentee voting for everyone. This system is also referred to as “vote-by-mail” or all-mail ballot elections. While “mostly-mail elections” means that every registered voter receives a ballot by mail, this does not preclude in-person voting opportunities on or before Election Day. For example, even though all registered voters in Colorado are mailed a ballot, voters can choose instead to cast a ballot at an in-person vote center during the early voting period or on Election Day.

According to this, "All mail elections" are not different from "mostly mail" elections, and doesn't preclude the use of in person voting.

Also

systems should make doing the wrong thing impossible

Please no, imo that's an incredibly fucked line of reasoning

According to this, “All mail elections” are not different from “mostly mail” elections, and doesn’t preclude the use of in person voting.

You can't vote in person in Oregon. There are no voting booths in the state. It is ALL done by mail, the way I heard it.

"Casting a ballot at a polling place" is not "voting in person". I sometimes cast my own ballots (California) at polling places. That is, fill in the ballot at home, and drop it off at the polling station instead of mailing it. Voting in person means there is a physical voting booth that you enter, close the curtain, and THEN make your voting choices, in an environment where no one else can see them. Poll workers are supposed to make sure that nobody goes into the booth with you, with some exceptions for disabled people (there are similar exceptions for absentee voting in non-VBM states). It's against the law to photograph your filled-in ballot inside the booth, though in the phone camera era that has become near impossible to enforce.

Please no, imo that’s an incredibly fucked line of reasoning

It is what you have to do in a secure system. Voting (like retail loss prevention) is of course a security vs convenience trade-off, so you might choose to allow the insecure approach at least some of the time. Again, a person with their eyes open has to be aware of all the issues and reach an informed conclusion. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downgrade_attack

Yeah, ok, that sucks. Oregon should still try to make actual polling locations available for people who need (or want) it.

I still don't think that that's a reason to abandon vote by mail altogether. The accessibility of it reduces the impact of other voting problems we have in the us overall.

I'm still going to push back hard on the idea that the system has to be 100% perfect. So long as humans are involved, that simply isn't possible.

There are always going to be tradeoffs.

I'm not currently proposing abandoning VBM, I'm just saying people shouldn't ignore the issue. A secret ballot is supposed to be one of the foundations of democracy and VBM doesn't provide it the way a voting booth does. These days though, I would be scared of voting booths (at least where there are long lines) because of COVID. COVID is what kicked California over to near-universal VBM in 2019, after all.

People have studied and analyzed this stuff for centuries and it's very easy to overlook things or make false assumptions if you just examine the immediate situation, without awareness of its long history. I'm not any kind of expert, but as a security nerd, I've seen the topic come up in that context.