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"Secret ballot"
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Secrecy and publicity in votes and debates
\"In the spirit of Jeremy Bentham's Political Tactics, this volume offers the first comprehensive discussion of the effects of secrecy and publicity on debates and votes in committees and assemblies. The contributors - sociologists, political scientists, historians, legal scholars - consider the micro-technology of voting (the devil is in the detail), the historical relations between the secret ballot and universal suffrage, the use and abolition of secret voting in parliamentary decisions, and the sometimes perverse effects of the drive for greater openness and transparency in public affairs. The authors also discuss the normative questions of secret versus public voting in national elections and of optimal mixes of secrecy and publicity, as well as the opportunities for strategic behavior created by different voting systems. Together with two previous volumes on Collective Wisdom (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Majority Decisions (Cambridge University Press, 2014), the book sets a new standard for interdisciplinary work on collective decision-making\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Possibilities of Implementing E-Voting System in Ukraine
There are constant risks and threats to fair elections against the background of the current crisis of democratic civic engagement and the global pursuit of convenience in the digital age. The political and institutional context in Ukraine, including wartime displacement, occupation of territories and a large diaspora abroad, requires innovative digital tools to ensure that all eligible voters can participate in elections. Therefore, the article aims to analyse the adherence to the principles of secret ballot and personal voting through alternative voting methods, such as e-voting. A four-level e-voting system is identified, having the legal, organisational, procedural and technological components. Moreover, the modern ways of securing, guaranteeing and ensuring the principles of secret ballot and personal voting in e-voting at these levels in Ukraine and abroad are clarified. To this end, the authors analyse legal approaches and electoral practice of foreign countries to determine how the substantive law is implemented in electoral procedures. It is established that the main problem of their unacceptability is the weak protection of confidentiality and the high probability of unauthorised interference with the voting procedure. However, it is possible to prevent such violations through a decentralised blockchain-based e-voting system. The article discusses the main advantages and disadvantages of using various platforms for e-voting, in particular Ethereum and the Hyperledger Fabric platform. Furthermore, the law of Ukraine is analysed concerning the possibility of using digital technologies in testing e-voting in elections and referendums.
Journal Article
Artificial intelligence and the secret ballot
In this paper, we argue that because of the advent of Artificial Intelligence, the secret ballot is now much less effective at protecting voters from voting related instances of social ostracism and social punishment. If one has access to vast amounts of data about specific electors, then it is possible, at least with respect to a significant subset of electors, to infer with high levels of accuracy how they voted in a past election. Since the accuracy levels of Artificial Intelligence are so high, the practical consequences of someone inferring one’s vote are identical to the practical consequences of having one’s vote revealed directly under an open voting regime. Therefore, if one thinks that the secret ballot is at least partly justified because it protects electors against voting related social ostracism and social punishment, one should be morally troubled by how Artificial Intelligence today can be used to infer individual electors’ past voting behaviour.
Journal Article
Vote buying and redistribution
Vote buying is a form of political clientelism involving pre-electoral transfers of money or material benefits from candidates to voters. Despite the presence of secret ballots, vote buying remains a pervasive phenomenon during elections in developing countries. While prior literature has focused on how vote buying is enforced by parties and political candidates and which types of voters are most likely targeted, we know much less about the behavioral spillover effects of vote buying on citizens’ demand for redistribution and contributions to the provision of public goods. In this paper, we provide evidence on how vote buying causally affects voters’ candidate choice, support for redistribution, and public goods provision. Using data from a laboratory experiment in Kenya, we find that vote buying is a double-edged sword for candidates using clientelist strategies: it attracts votes from those who were offered money and accepted it, but it also leads to negative reactions from those who rejected the offer as well as those who were not offered money. In line with its effect on voting behavior, vote buying has negative effects on subjects’ evaluations of the vote-buying candidate. Vote buying significantly reduces individuals’ stated preferences for more government spending on police and law enforcement—yet, surprisingly, not on other welfare areas such as unemployment benefits or health. We also find that open ballots—but not vote-buying campaigns—reduce individuals’ willingness to contribute to public goods provisions.
Journal Article
EL VOTO SECRETO EN CHILE: REGÍMENES DE PUBLICIDAD Y PRIVACIDAD ELECTORAL, 1872-1958
[...]I seek to compare the proposals of the national literature and recent contributions to the international studies on this matter. KEY WORDS Australian ballot - Bribery - Public Voting - Secret Ballot. El secreto del voto se declara como un aspecto ineludible de los mínimos democráticos, que incluyen el derecho a elegir y ser electo, la voluntad popular como fundamento del poder, la expresión de esta a través de elecciones públicas y periódicas, y la universalidad del sufragio.5 Sin embargo, de un tiempo a esta parte, surgieron críticas dirigidas contra el voto secreto, debido a supuestos efectos nocivos que tendría al fomentar la atomización de los votantes y disminuir su capacidad deliberativa6. En primer lugar, que el voto no pueda ser visto por quien queremos que lo vea, a saber, por quien nos pudiera premiar.
Journal Article
Privacy and Democracy: What the Secret Ballot Reveals
Does the rejection of pure proceduralism show that we should adopt Brettschneider’s value theory of democracy? The answer, this article suggests, is “no.” There are a potentially infinite number of incompatible ways to understand democracy, of which the value theory is, at best, only one. The article illustrates and substantiates its claims by looking at what the secret ballot shows us about the importance of privacy and democracy. Drawing on the reasons to reject Mill’s arguments for open voting, in a previous article by A. Lever, it argues that people’s claims to privacy have a constitutive, as well as an instrumental, importance to democratic government, which is best seen by attending to democracy as a practice, and not merely as a distinctive set of values.
Journal Article
Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States?
Why is the United States the only advanced capitalist country with no labor party? This question is one of the great enduring puzzles of American political development, and it lies at the heart of a fundamental debate about the nature of American society. Tackling this debate head-on, Robin Archer puts forward a new explanation for why there is no American labor party--an explanation that suggests that much of the conventional wisdom about \"American exceptionalism\" is untenable.
Conventional explanations rely on comparison with Europe. Archer challenges these explanations by comparing the United States with its most similar New World counterpart--Australia. This comparison is particularly revealing, not only because the United States and Australia share many fundamental historical, political, and social characteristics, but also because Australian unions established a labor party in the late nineteenth century, just when American unions, against a common backdrop of industrial defeat and depression, came closest to doing something similar.
Archer examines each of the factors that could help explain the American outcome, and his systematic comparison yields unexpected conclusions. He argues that prosperity, democracy, liberalism, and racial hostility often promoted the very changes they are said to have obstructed. And he shows that it was not these characteristics that left the United States without a labor party, but, rather, the powerful impact of repression, religion, and political sectarianism.
eBook
Towards a Global History of Voting: Sovereignty, the Diffusion of Ideas, and the Enchanted Individual
This article suggests a framework for moving toward a global history of voting and democracy that focuses less on the diffusion of European ideas (however important those ideas were) than on embedding the history of voting within a worldwide history of ideas on sovereignty. The article posits a general framework for such a history focusing on a “conundrum of sovereignty” grounding legitimate rule in a space imagined as simultaneously within and outside worldly society. Rooted in a “secular theology” such ideas shaped in the 19th and 20th centuries the establishment of systems of mass voting (including the secret ballot), and the sovereignty of the “people” both in Europe and other parts of the world alike, in the process producing an image of the individual voter as an “enchanted individual.” The article looks at developments within Europe and in India in these terms.1
Journal Article
Against the secret ballot: Toward a new proposal for open voting
The secret ballot is considered a central feature of free and fair elections all over the world. While the reasons to uphold it seem to be overwhelming, we argue that the secret ballot is only second-best at best and that a modified version of open voting might prove to be more democratic. Instead of denying the various problems and difficulties that an open system might encounter, we want to offer a genuine proposal that can avoid these numerous pitfalls. After rehearsing the various arguments pro and contra open voting, we draw attention to the role of shame, which has been neglected by both sides in the debate. While shame plays a pivotal role in the democratic argument pro open voting, it also brings out new problems that tell against opening up the vote. This means that, if we want to draw on the democratic potential of open voting, we will have to find a system that minimizes the undesirable effects of shame. In the third and final section, we will formulate a concrete proposal of open voting that we believe is more democratic than the current secret ballot and is able to avoid potential worries. Even if this proves to be highly speculative, it serves as an invitation for further empirical research.
Journal Article
“Mind How You Vote, Boys”: The Crisis of Economic Voter Intimidation in the Late-Nineteenth Century United States, 1873–1896
This dissertation argues that the convergence of industrialized wage-labor, increased economic precariousness, close and partisan elections, and weak ballot laws dramatically increased the incidence of economic voter intimidation between 1873 and 1896. When this form of coercion primarily affected African American voters, as it did in the 1860s, politicians did not perceive it as a threat to democracy. White Americans' fear that wage labor rendered them as economically precarious, and thus politically dependent, as they believed African Americans were, provoked a prolonged crisis. Concern over the threat that economic voter intimidation posed to white men's citizenship shaped the ongoing debates over the nature of manhood suffrage, the role of the federal government in protecting African American men's political rights, and the future of industrial capitalism. Politicians, ordinary workingmen, and labor, reform, and socialist advocates saw employer coercion as a threat to both American democracy and industrial capitalism because it seemed to undermine the independence—and therefore manliness and whiteness—of industrial workers. Between 1888-1892, these reformers transformed the way that Americans voted in nearly every state by enacting ballot secrecy laws to break the chain of information between employers, their employees, and their employees' ballots. The combination of ballot secrecy and a cultural backlash against economic voter intimidation spurred by employers' excesses during the fraught 1896 presidential election drove the practice out of the mainstream in American political culture by the turn of the century.
Dissertation