End the "secret" ballot and make ballots public to make elections real again

Liberty Election Reform & Political Integrity
41

A counter argument to this is that if I have to force you to vote, I don’t think you ought to be deciding our future.

I believe mandatory voting is a sure fire way to get an overwhelming number of low quality votes by uninformed voters. You might be able to force me to “pull a lever” but good luck actually getting me to give a crap about informing myself as to which lever I pull.

Hehe, I’d be willing to bet $5 that if we ran the experiment between no one gets to vote and we have randomly selected winners versus everyone must vote in mandatory voting results, that over time, the randomly selected winners would net net govern the country better. :rofl:

42

While it is a requirement to have a driver’s license if you want to drive (at least in an area where anyone would catch you driving), driving itself is not a requirement.

If you use public transportation, are driven everywhere by somewhere else, or have some other means of getting around, you can get by just fine without a driver’s license.

For example, my Grandma let her driver’s license expire years ago because she was at an age where she really wasn’t up to the hassle of it anymore, so now she has other people drive her where she needs to go. She has an ID for situations where an ID is required but all things considered she gets by without a Driver’s License just fine.

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43

I also want to be able to see that my vote was logged/counted. No more federal money to states to run elections until I can log in and see my vote was counted. Each state needs transparency and online view of my/Their vote pre and post Election Day

44

Why are people concerned about privacy? This is because they fear some sort of retaliation or discrimination. This really gets at the heart of it though, why were votes public in the past?

Voting is a proxy for violence which is why it was only men who voted in the past and not for the propagandistic reason of “suppressing women”, it was to protect women from being in proximity to violence. Each vote represents a man at arms and originates in our European martial traditions which is why we “campaign” and “rally” for votes (men at arms to fight for a cause). The armies with the largest numbers won more often than not so voting turns out to be a less costly way to decide conflicts, unless votes are not properly accounted for.

If they are not properly accounted for then one side may discover that it is more costly to not engage in real violence. Making votes transparent is the right direction, but it also requires removing people–who shouldn’t be in proximity to violence in the first place–from franchise.

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45

In short, especially if people publicly can see how you’re voting as it happens, it enables all sorts of corruptive influence shenanigans. It’s not fear of it’s what was actually going on. There were schemes for both punishments and rewards for voting a particular way (there are too many ways to list, but you could be fired if you didn’t vote the right way and get a bonus if you did, which gave the wealthy of the day, through their voter influence, undue influence over the politicians).

Here’s a short two paragraphs that give you some insight as to some of the many methods of corruption the public ballot creates and why it was found necessary to end the public ballot and bring in the secret ballot (and the move worked):
https://www.congressionalresearch.org/SecretBallot.html

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46

I would give that line of thinking more grace if it actually prevented the corruption it claims to solve for, in hindsight we KNOW it doesn’t and actually puts everything behind closed doors and into the shadows. It is more difficult to corrupt the entire body of the people than it is to corrupt a few politicians and bureaucrats. That aside, the solution would be to punish any election interference, business owners would easily be identified for prosecution under such transparency. So, who really benefits from all the secrecy? The greatest disinfectant would be to bring it all to light.

47

I can’t comprehend what point you’re meaning to make with this…

What we KNOW is that it did fix exactly the concerns mentioned because those things were happening and are exceedingly well documented as having been going on. Election days were celebrated like watching prize fight boxing matches as the day unfolded.

The practices were openly discussed as problems in the era while they were going on (and at various points earlier all the way back to before the founding). People’s jobs were used by the employers (mostly the uber wealthy) to coerce voting a particular way. The corporate interests were aligned along party lines, and employees were the “voting base” that they could ensure always voted the way they were supposed to; and a whole host of other bad things. Those particular kinds of corrupted activities stopped immediately after enabling the secret ballot.

It’s hard to prove causation, but the synchronicity and correlation, and lack of alternative coincident correlations, makes a highly compelling case for “the secret ballot solved those issues.” I’m not arguing it didn’t create other issues that we are now seeing. Merely that it did in fact actually solve for the set of issues A that we are referring to even it simultaneously created set of issues B.

There are whole books on the subject of the history of the secret ballot.

You asked “why” you were answered, then you say “I don’t believe it actually happened, the secret ballot was purely created as a conspiracy to corrupt behind closed doors counting”.

I think more likely it’s “cheaters are gonna cheat” so when they lost their old way of cheating they studied the system to find out how they could find new ways to cheat, and succeeded.

The issue of “only legitimate voters can cast ballots” is a separate issue irrespective of secrecy.

The other issue of “counted as cast” we can solve for while maintaining the benefits of secrecy protections.

There are several different ways to do it.

My personal favorite atm is some version of taking the ballot receipt with your choices on it that you confirm at the time of voting, and submit it to a separate “ballot audit images” database with separate custody at the same time as voting (i.e. turn your actual ballot in to the official System A, and drop your receipt off with Audit System B which stores the receipt image (which you confirm) in a way that makes changing it without detection essentially impossible). System B, the audit system, is fully accessible to the public and citizens run their own counts off of System B.

The whole country can see both sets of results, and anyone can download any/all of the audit image databases and run their own count. If the two systems don’t reconcile, “reconciliation procedures” ensue, legal challenges can be made. It’s about as close to a hand count of paper ballots by many independent actors that I think we could hope for, and in many ways I think it’s even better than one.

We can provide as many of these audit databases to as many separate independent custodians on voting day as you deem necessary to reasonably be beyond collusion ability (for example if every party and a couple independent groups were all custodians of a ballot image database, the odds are very low you could get them all to collude together to manipulate the results in the same way without being detected).

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48

We live in a society where not all of the bad things that happen to people are overtly criminal.

I can hire you or fire you over your expressed political viewpoints, and voting is an expression of political viewpoint. That’s not illegal and can not be made illegal (1st amendment issues). A company is not obligated to provide jobs and pay people they deem as not aligned with the values of their company.

To use an extreme example, if I worked for you and I voted for the “Bring back Eugenics and Retarded People’s Sterilization Party” my public vote could be used to weaponize boycotts against your business by people who wanted to see you fail (for whatever reason they did so). You might be forced to fire me to protect your business. Further, I would hope that you would fire me because I’m not reflecting the kind of character and values that you believe are part of the culture you want to create and foster at your business. You personally might stand firm on the “we support first amendment free speech and do not hire or fire employees based on their political viewpoints”, but I don’t think the case for that can be made that all companies must share your viewpoint on that.

This is one of thousands of ways in which the secrecy/privacy of our individual political beliefs protects our free speech and is beneficial to the overall cohesion of the social fabric of our society.

I know people whose lives would be ruined for years if they were discovered to be a Trump voter.

There is also an infamous accountant who lost his job and years later still can’t find work because he went viral after filming himself going off on a Chick-Fil-A drive thru attendant for the company’s corporate religiously based practices and political viewpoints. This might not be voting, but it points to the consequences of publicly expressing your political viewpoints.

The Washington Post lost 20% of its subscribers because they refused to endorse Kamala Harris.
Taylor Swift had millions of people unfollow her social media accounts because she did endorse Kamala Harris.

Imagine what people would do with mandatory public voting records?

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49

Your statements here boil down to you wanting people to hide who they are so that people cannot voluntarily associate or disassociate. If people are not fully informed and are not allowed to voluntarily associate or disassociate then how can they build long lasting norms, traditions, ethics, morals, etc that they all hold in common? Our communities are not supposed to be economic zones, they are supposed to be Commonwealth that we invest in. So all you are saying is you fear disassociation but why should anyone be forced to associate? It violates reciprocity and that is the basis for what is lawful in a society governed by natural (empirical), common, and concurring democracy which produces settlement of disputes and discovery of law at all scales. You are advocating the creation of ambiguity which reduces decidability and undermines that which is lawful.

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With or without transparency people need and will self sort into areas that reflect their interests, transparency helps that much needed process along so that we can build communities and not live in economic zones.

51

It’s interesting that you bring up the Nazi’s as well, you might not be aware of this but Hitler came to power via secret vote so I’m not sure that really helps your argument the way you would want it to.

Here is a list of people who came to power via secret ballot:

  1. Adolf Hitler
  2. Benito Mussolini
  3. Hugo Chavez
  4. Recep Tayyip Erdogan

UNCOMFORTABLE QUESTION:

  1. There is no evidence that democracy is a ‘good’.

Instead, a constitution of rule of law of the concurrent(vote), common(court), natural law(science of cooperation), and transactional change to the law(originalism) under those constraints (natural law sovereignty) is a good – and voting is simply a necessity of determining concurrency.

You will find more comprehension of the Anglo-American system of government in that one sentence than in all the volumes written on the subject to date.

Under the Natural Law (Science of Cooperation, by the natural law of decidability) using Concurrent(positive, voting), Common (Negative, court dispute resolution), recorded as transactions against a ledger (textualism) whose terms (think prices) correspond to those weights and measures of those terms the time of recording (originalism), the law, whether finding of the court, legislative contract beween classes and regions, or regulations necessary to implement them, is a record of our agreement – not a means of forcing behavioral change by authoritarian imposition. As such all legislation and regulation is required to be settled law. As such he sovereignty of the people individually, in classes, and in regions is maintained, by tests of concurrency and commonality.

  1. That’s because it’s the optimum means of requiring the public accept(legitimize by consent) legislation and law – thereby forcing the people to adapt by consent rather than by political force imposed under law.

  2. Democracy is just a test of concurrency by class and region.

  3. Which parties undermine that rule of law of natural law?
    a. The right favors concurrency, commonality, and conformity in order to maximize commons.
    b. The right is trying to restore rule of law but as an anti-intellectual tradition, it uses moral and religious language.
    c. The right is naturally eugenic (via anglo), puts the production of the intergenerational family ahead of the individual; minimizes incentives to resist maturity into productivity, responsibility, and liability; maximizes the rate of group production, innovation, & adaptation.

  1. AFAIK the left favors irresponsibility, non-adaptability, non-conformity, consumption over commons, individual over family, dysgenia, and deliberately destroys institutions of cultural production that enable cooperation in a division of labor at scale despite our inequalities.

  2. So AFAIK the left represents the feminine dysgenic instinct to maximize numbers increasing demand for income and consumption – and the right represents the eugenic instinct to maximize group advantage, while reducing demand for income by production of discounts via commons.

  3. So since these biases (a) are immutable instincts (b) we are prosperous enough to follow our sex bias in political orders just as we have demonstrated sex bias in morals, occupation, and aesthetics (c) then why don’t we just separate into polities we prefer and trade(not war)?

  1. I don’t think enough of us are intellectually honest to grant the opposition’s instincts their due, and separate into regional states (as did christian and protestant Europe) so that we split happily into M:European(Aristocratic) tradition and F:Semitic(Marxist) tradition.

  2. So why is it that the right no longer comprehends its tradition of rule of law of concurrent, common, natural law if the founders wrote it down, the English, Germans, the Romans and Greeks practiced it? And why does the left try to REDEFINE rule of law as majority democracy?

52

Now let’s double check that we agree on what it is we’re disagreeing over here.

  1. Only legitimate voters are allowed to cast ballots. We are assuming that the legitimacy of the ballots we are counting is not in question. That’s a separate discussion not discussed in this policy proposal.

  2. Ballots are counted as cast. This is what we are disagreeing on.

You are asserting that the only mechanism capable of ensuring that a ballot is counted as cast is if people are forced to reveal their private voting selections so the ballot counting can be audited and each voter is able to ensure that their ballot in the counting system reflects the choices they made. Therefore we must end the secret ballot.

I am disagreeing with that assertion.
We already have techniques available to us that we can apply to the voting procedures that can in fact maintain a dissociated connection between voter and ballot, and reasonably prove via auditing that all votes were counted as cast. I described such a system in my earlier post.

Now you seem to be suggesting that you have a right to private and personally held beliefs that folks wish to keep private in the name of social fabric benefit.

I personally like the 4th amendment and think we should keep it exactly as it is.

We have had the secret ballot for almost 150 years now and I would argue the evidence shows it has made the social community fabric stronger, not weaker.

If you want to move the goal post to argue that we should get rid of the 4th amendment to build social cohesion despite not having any evidence for it, you go right ahead. I’ll definitely still disagree with you as I don’t think you have that right; nobody owes you reciprocity and you can’t legislate your way into getting it.

Actually, it makes my argument even stronger because of the actual facts regarding how he/they came to be in power and America’s history with politically violent groups.

  1. For historical accuracy, Hilter didn’t win either of the national elections in Germany in 1932, he was installed by Parliament after losing the elections. Nobody “won” those elections. Look it up.
    The party that largely held power at the time installed him as Chancellor to get what share of the votes he did win to form a coalition government thinking they could keep the Nazis in check. A year later the German Parliament (their capital building) was attacked and burned (official story is that the fire was set by a lone communist arsonist who was quickly executed). That was used as the pretext to declare their form of marshal law to protect the government and he never relinquished it. That’s how Hitler became the de facto dictator of Germany.

  2. Again for historical perspective, from everything I understand about the situation in Germany at the time, whether the ballot was secret or public, the Nazi party was so popular they were going to get a lot of votes in those 1932 elections regardless. My argument suggests that the only reason Hilter didn’t outright actually win that first election was because of the secret ballot, not in spite of it. Without the secret ballot the Nazi brownshirts would have known exactly who to go after and attack and everyone would know that if they didn’t vote the right way they would be the brownshirt’s next target; intimidated and cudgeled for voting the wrong way. The brownshirts were violent. Could you imagine what the KKK would have done if they had access to everyone’s private voting record information?

  3. You’re not making an argument against the secret ballot, you’re simply pointing to the idea “if you are going to have a secret ballot, you need audits and protections to ensure those ballots are ‘counted as cast’”. Which is exactly the same argument I’m making…

We can point to many things that enabled him to remain in power, but the secret ballot isn’t one of them. This implication that somehow the secret ballot is responsible for the rise of Socialism, Fascism, and Communism in countries around the world falls flat.

But to make what you’re saying into an actual logical argument, instead of this weird, idiotic, scare mongering, emotional appeal, is that yes, the secret ballot has, and is today, used as the vehicle to keep dictators in power.

The secret ballot has its dangers, just like nuclear power and driving a car. The safeguards put in place do in fact seriously matter and the secret ballot could if improperly managed use non-auditable secret back room counting mechanisms to keep themselves in power with a sham democracy voting process.

They could do it even easier by leveraging the public ballot voter rolls because then they would know exactly who their enemies and friends were. Cheaters are gonna cheat.

Like most everything else of any consequence, the details on HOW you go about something matters.

Unless this policy is just a sham excuse because you want to dissociate from people based on their voting record like you said, you don’t believe in the right to privacy because it diminishes your ability to properly vet people as you suggested, or you want to empower abuse of the public voter information database because you want to make sure the violent arms of political parties know who exactly who their friends are and have a precision hit list for their enemies like I demonstrated and explained, then you aren’t against the secret ballot itself.

You are against the non-auditable secret back room counting processes. And I agree with you; I am against those too. We can fix the back room secret counting processes without tossing away the secrecy of the ballot itself.

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53

I’m having a hard time understanding why you would value not having clear friend/enemy distinctions, why would you want enemies to be amongst you and your loved ones where they are able to undermine and plunder multigenerational wealth your kin and kith have paid the cost of producing and maintaining over time as a property held in common? Furthermore, why would you want to allow violations of reciprocity and subject the population to such, allowing for real property damages at all scales, where all forms of capital are accounted for and some of which are not recoverable?.

RECIPROCITY NLI
RECIPROCITY NLI1600×900 79.5 KB

54

This is, in essence, the same emotional chain yanking as people who are for hate speech laws use. Against my protecting a near absolute free speech (1A rights), which is an absolute requirement for us to remain a free people, you could say “I can’t understand why you would want people to be able to say hateful untrue things to your loved ones and cause potential emotional harm to your loved ones?”.

Are you an advocate of creating online censorship and laws against whatever the government decides is “hate speech”? Do I need to explain why banning speech based on content must not ever be a thing we allow in this country?

The basic answer is ignoring the emotional feelings of people resulting from things people who aren’t them say is WAY more valuable a benefit to society than providing the government the power to regulate anything we say to each other in the name of preventing that.

Further, I fundamentally disagree with a few of those bullet points on “the law of reciprocity” graphic you showed. So we aren’t even disagreeing over the same idea even though we are using the same word.

I use the definition of reciprocity from the dictionary which is much simpler and more like “people acting in like-kind to each other” or “a mutually beneficial exchange”. But I don’t believe “we are being reciprocal” to each other is necessarily for our mutual benefit, we could be reciprocal in exchanging blow for blow with each other and I would consider that reciprocity too.

It’s not that I don’t value reciprocity, of course I do, I simply value other things, a few other things, WAY more to protect and maintain the freedoms within our society. Similar to the answer regarding near absolute 1A rights.

We don’t have a right to a kind and good society, we must continuously work to keep and maintain one, and that cannot be entrusted to any fictional group of people like “the government”. That’s the story of the entirety of human history.

Natural law behavior and temptations doesn’t just magically disappear because our ancestors worked really hard to produce a society in which we enjoy an incredible amount of peace while simultaneously maintaining a radical ideological diversity within our body politic.

The secret ballot is a key enabler of that relative peace and we have the historical receipts to prove it.

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55

Most people pretty much know how we are voting anyway with social media. If not putting names on ballots, there could be an assigned number to each person when they register to vote and that number would be on the ballot. Only you and the circuit clerk’s office would know who belonged to that number. Just a thought.

56

For something as important as voting with margins often less than 1%, why is the acceptable error rate anywhere near 1%. That can be a LOT of votes.

57

I am not looking to avoid delving into the philosophical underpinnings you’re discussing in the lengthy post here.

I even agree with Winston Churchill on this (setting aside the distinction on Constitutional Republic vs Democracy because the point is basically the same):

‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’

It just doesn’t feel appropriate to discuss such a deep, exploratory topic under the framework of this particular proposal. Feel free to DM me.

But to summarize for folks my general response has a couple angles to it:

  • 80% of the population in your society should be able to decently function well in it with the intellectual understanding of something around a ten year old. Otherwise your society is too complicated for humans to function well in.
  • I treat “natural law” as “what happens when there are no laws”. When you remove all the rules of “civilized society” then humans act out their natural instincts; it’s the “Wild West”. This can be a successful society, it just isn’t something most Americans want to live in.
  • Lastly, and some people have a hard time accepting the hard truth of this, but what makes a civilized society “civil” ultimately boils to the demonstrated capacity for the motive, means, and opportunity to apply the use of force. That’s what all governance ultimately is, behavioral rules resting on top of the threat/use of force. Otherwise those “rules” are really simply “requests” because there are no consequences for “breaking them”. The founding fathers of America understood this very well and made it part of their reasoning. As part of the “social contract” we imbue our invented government with a near monopoly on the use of force, and from that comes the tense negotiation between a government that will be pulled toward tyranny and its answerability to the people under its governance.

We can wax philosophical all we want, but in the end, we are still bound by the harsh reality that whatever we attempt to implement will ultimately rest on the application of force to make it so. Further, masculinity has a near monopoly on the use of force in the human species while femininity holds the authority to drive when/where force will be applied.

I know that second femininity part doesn’t instantly appear obviously true the same way the masculinity part does, but essentially “for women/a woman” is ultimately why men do most anything at all; consequently, what the men understand women to want (that doesn’t mean the men actually understand, simply what they believe) becomes the main driver for men’s activity choices above the basic survival levels. My goal here isn’t to defend the position, simply to state what my position on “how society operates” would essentially be in a philosophical offline conversation about it.

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58

I don’t know about your State, but in Virginia you can go to the Dept. of Elections website, create an account for yourself and view your voting record to confirm that you ballot was recorded.

60

The natural law of reciprocity isn’t the common definition and has to be taken all together not just one point because it is a measurement. The common definition isn’t precise which is why you can poke holes in it but can’t with the natural law of reciprocity.

61

Then you should pick a new word.

Sure I can, here’s four holes the size of the grand canyon:

“Fully Informed”
This bullet point is impossible to satisfy because it’s an entirely subjective standard. No matter how much information you supply there will always be more relevant information that is left in the unknown and potentially even unknowable. Therefore this quality can never be fulfilled, and therefore this version of “the law of reciprocity” can never be practiced by real humans in a real society.

“Productive”
Again, by whose definition of productivity?
We just had an election, there was a winner and loser, the country is going to go in a direction the losing party considers “unproductive”. So you’re saying that using elections as a means for deciding by a group of people does not meet the standard of “the law of reciprocity”.

“Free of costs upon the Demonstrated Interests of Others”
Again, this is impossible to satisfy for any engagement of any significance. There can be no diversity of thought/desire and simultaneous satisfaction of this point.

“Warrantied”
It’s hard to even know what exactly this means but it’s almost impossible to future proof an agreement against unforeseen eventualities.
If I warranty your home, and a hurricane hits and blows it away, does this law require me to build you a new one; and if not then how can you guarantee it is warrantied aside from mutual agreement. If by mutual agreement, then how can you deny me the opportunity to say “there shall be no warranty or fitness for a particular use case” and still maintain the other bullet point of “Voluntary” which violates the logical rules of having axioms that maintain internal consistency…

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