Honest Voting

For giggles I typed “history of the secret ballot” into the Google search box this afternoon. Greece, yes; Rome, sure; France and Australia, got it. But I was surprised to learn during my search that the United Kingdom currently doesn’t have a secret ballot. That is, they can match your elector number to your ballot, though by law it takes a court order and an awful lot of work. (In contrast, in the United States ballots are numbered, but remain anonymous.)

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say (no, don’t take me to task, you’ll see the government citation in a minute; Wikipedia just explains it more concisely than I could):

The UK secret ballot arrangements are sometimes criticised because it is possible to link a ballot paper to the voter that cast it. Each ballot paper is individually numbered and each elector has a number. When an elector is given a ballot paper, their number is noted down on the counterfoil of the ballot paper (which also carries the ballot paper number). This means, of course, that the ballot is not secret at all.

This measure is thought to be justified as a security arrangement so that if there was an allegation of fraud, false ballot papers could be identified. The process of matching ballot papers to voters is permissible only if an Elections Court requires it, and this is an extremely unlikely occurrence. The legal authority for this system is set out in the Parliamentary Elections Rules in Schedule 1 of the Representation of the People Act 1983.

Over here you can read a British voter becoming irate that his ballot isn’t secret, after which someone provides the link to the British government’s explanation of why they can eventually figure out who voted with which ballot (this takes you to a PDF). I did enjoy the byplay in this blog’s comment section, where Edinburgh Voter explains that it would take so much trouble to track down individual votes and voters that tracking would hardly ever be used, and after all, who would bother with a conspiracy on that level? Edinburgh Voter’s faith in humanity touched my heart, even as I agree that yes, matching voters and ballots wouldn’t be easy. But I’m more with the commenter Chris, who says, “Optimism is good, but prevention is much better. The fact that the link between these pieces of paper exists means something could go wrong.”

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