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