I have reached the conclusion that secret ballot voting is awful and desperately needs to be stopped. Though normally hailed, and even so endorsed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as being necessary to prevent intimidation and “vote bullying”, secret ballots have one, insurmountable consequence: a lack of accountability.
The problem is the fact that you face no personal consequences for the consequences of your vote faced by everyone else. Now to be sure, in practice your vote is quite meaningless—it is, after all, one out of tens of millions. But at some level it is true that in the aggregate, millions of people holding the same belief and voting according to that belief constitutes immense power over the lives of others. And yet, people have no right to know the way their neighbors are voting. No right to see who is deciding half of their paycheck should go to someone else. No right to see who is oppressing them.
There’s a reason why the votes of individual congressmen and women are available for all to see. So we can judge them according to their decisions. Praise them for the ones we agree with, and scorn them for the ones we disagree with. We are able to then see who works for us, and who works against. Why should this not be true of other voters? If we are to be forcibly bound together and held to the random whims of our neighbors as we are in democracy, shouldn’t we at least have the right to know who among us are greedy welfare enthusiasts, economic illiterates, war mongers?
Your vote should be public. It should be posted with your name, State, and district on an easily accessible website. I imagine that this website would get enough traffic to make it a lucrative endeavor by some company and so no public funds would be necessary to get it off the ground (don’t you love free market solutions!). This way people will face judgement, ostracism, heckling, or at the very least dirty looks—and so will maybe think twice about voting for dumb things, or even voting at all. Maybe they could even get fired from their job when their boss sees that they voted for a policy like minimum wage that directly hurts the company they work for (like they would for any other behavior that hurt the company). The possibilities are endless.
What justifies this is the fact that voting is not a belief, but an action. And what’s more, it is an action that directly affects the lives of others. If you disagree with the fact that people should be judged and discriminated against based upon their actions then I would like to ask you what you judge people based on. If not based on someone’s actions, how do you differentiate between those you like or don’t like, those who you prefer to hang out with, do business with, sell to, buy from (all are forms of discrimination)? Our actions are what define us and voting is a grave action. It doesn’t only affect you, but those around you, and that is why it should be public information and why you should be judged for it. It seems to me that most well-adjusted and successful adults accept the fact that they need to take responsibility for their actions in every other area of their life, and there is no reason why this mentality should not also be extended to the act of voting.
You should face palpable consequences for your vote. This seems extremely self-evident. Wouldn’t it be nice to have been able to see who voted for the Nazis in 1932 and 33? Wouldn’t it be nice to see who votes for president Trump or Clinton so you can blame them when his or her policies go awry? The nature of voting negates your right to privacy about it. More often than not it’s you deciding whether or not men (and women) with guns will have the ability to force your beliefs on others. I for one would love to see who votes for Bernie (though it’s not too hard to tell as it is because they’re so very enthusiastic) so I know which of my acquaintances are okay with (and pretty excited about) using the violence of the state to get their way.
The main arguments against an open ballot are not really relevant in a society with a relatively strong rule of law like the United States and Western Europe. If someone intimidates, threatens, or uses force against you then they will be treated as any normal criminal—so long as they don’t hail from one of our fine state agencies. In other words, saying we must have secret ballots because we’re afraid of criminals is kind of like saying we shouldn’t be allowed to walk down the street because we have the possibility of being robbed. As for votes being bought, they can be bought now. At least with open ballots people would know whether or not they are getting their money’s worth.
In closing, democracy is a much less than ideal system. It binds millions or hundreds of millions of unique individuals together and gives each a sliver of power to dictate the lives of everyone else. It produces only division, chaos, and turmoil with everyone chomping at the bit to seize the reins of power so their unintelligent or uninformed or fanatic coworker or cousin or neighbor doesn’t get at them first and use it against them. It creates a situation of all against all, of endless groups against endless other groups all shamelessly trying to control everyone else.
But if we are going to have such a system, I would like to know where the people around me stand. This could help us choose who to associate with, who to work for, who to hire, where to live, where to send our kids to school. Making these decisions based on another’s beliefs may be ill-advised, but doing so based on actions like voting is both practical and justifiable. An individual voting may be insignificant in terms of its effect on the outcome, but that vote tells you a lot about that individual. And I think we all have a right to know that information.