Such a weird argument. I've never met anybody with a sledgehammer threatening votes. Feels like a willfully absurd excuse to avoid having an audit trail in elections.
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Then you haven’t lived under a dictatorship. It might not be a sledgehammer, but breaking voter secrecy and pressuring people to vote the “right” way is very much a thing.
This. In Russia, employees of all sorts of organisations are “encouraged” to vote for a particular candidate or party (not always the ruling party, though it doesn’t really matter for different reasons I won’t get into).
As far as I know, these votes have gone mostly unchecked before electronic voting, but after that, they’ve started voting straight from the workplace computers. There were, of course, a lot of straight-up falsifications as well.
That said, our pen-on-paper voting isn’t too legit either :’)
In the sort of scenario you're talking about the dictator doesn't care how people vote. 'The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.' If he has such a lack of control that a mere election, which is to be counted fairly, could have him leave power, then it'd be somewhat farcical to declare him a dictator with all the connotations such a term implies.
Yes but no. The looks are also important. They want 80-99% to stroke their ego and nice pictures to claim legitimacy. The latter seemingly being useful both internally and externally.
Clearly, you haven’t lived behind the iron curtain. Checking up on what people do, and how they vote, would factor in promotions, school access for kids etc. this is by no means hypothetical.
I encourage everyone to look up the relevant sources, easy to find.
Can you actually back this up? I have seen this argument before thrown around like dogma, even though I have NEVER seen it in the modern world.
The closest I can think of is rare cases like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushel%27s_Case
There are lots of reported cases in Russia, when your manager requires you to take photo of your paper ballot and show it to them, otherwise you have problems.
You can try to google-translate [this, for example](https://holod.media/2024/03/08/soprotivlenie-putinu/#h-3-%D0...)
Reported as in an advice article that claims it’s happening? This same article gives advice for what to do if it happens with paper ballots in real life! So clearly, paper ballots aren’t a panacea. And there is a far larger problem with paper ballots: you cannot check whether your vote was even counted correctly. With properly designed crypto electronic voting systems using eg Merkle trees that doesn’t happen. There are ways to make sure your vote was correctly counted while at the same time not being to prove to anyone how you voted.
You don't need a dictatorship to nudge people to vote the "right" way, just incentives for the masses:
Vote for me and I'll increase your pensions, the other guy wants to decrease your pensions.
Vote for me and I'll increase wages of gov workers and civil servants, the other guy wants to fire gov workers.
VOte for me and I'll increase your welfare and give you free* housing.
The gov has masses of people that depend on the gov's generosity that they can leverage with a carrot on a stick to swing the majority in their favor. You don't need to put a gun to their head. The gun to their head is the threat of losing those government provided perks.
That's how elections are won in Europe, just promise the boomers(largest voter base) higher pensions. That's why nobody who campaigns on reforming the pension system will ever win an election.
At some level, incentives, masses bribes and political polices are interchangeable. A few almost real examples from Argentina:
Party A) Keep the 80% discount in the electricity and gas bills
Party B) Reduce inflation from 200% y.o.y. to 50% y.o.y.
Party C) [I don't remember]
Party D) "A normal country"
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PS: D was a slogan, they got less than 5% of the votes.
I agree with the other comment about dictators and similar threatening voters, but at a mundane level: domestic violence.
People do, in fact, threaten or coerce their spouse and that extends to voting.
Being able to audit from a secure counting room and being able to produce an always-available-online permanent record is different.
You haven't in any way prevented this scenario. Somebody could just as well demand that their spouse take a photo or video of their vote. Yeah no cameras allowed in the voting booth is a rule, but it's not like it's enforced or even realistically enforceable.
The "no cameras/no phones" rule is absolutely enforced in Harris County, Texas, although as an election worker I have never seen this escalate beyond "Please put away your phone". Workers are to ask the voter to put it away and if not done so immediately they are to notify the election judge (top official for that location/precinct). Judge will approach and ask again and cite the actual Texas law and show the voter a posterboard with the law printed in at least 4 different languages.
At this point, if the voter has not checked in yet, we can refuse to do so. Either way, if the phone/camera is still out after the judge has asked and shown them the law, judge is to immediately call the constable's office (police), who have been positioned nearby (but never directly at any vote center, due to possible intimidation). The constable can and will remove the man from the vote center. (It's never escalated that far!) (arresting that voter for any length of time might be problematic on election day for obvious reasons).
The most common complaint is "but I wrote up all my selections on there!" and for these voters we can provide a paper "sample ballot" and even a pen and they are free to mark their selections outside of the room and then come back to vote on the machine. One location was a church that was even gracious enough to allow a gentleman to AirPrint his notes.
Also of note, we do not have any kind of a "booth", however, the machines are typically placed rather far apart, and no one is allowed to queue at or near the machines, or linger there after voting, so I believe that privacy is effectively maintained. (Workers including judges are not even allowed to linger there unless assisting a voter who has specifically asked for help, and even then, there's more rules - if the voter needs help actually making the selections for candidates, now you need at least one judge and one clerk, one of whom must observe and ensure that the voter's selections were made correctly.)
We also got rid of the problematic "digital only" machines several years ago, but this post is too long already.
The solution in Australia is simpler - you don't submit the vote that you took a photo of. You can get a ballot, fill it out the "right" way, take a photo, erase the markings, write on your preferred vote, and submit that.
Even if you ignore the pencil they give you and use a pen, you can simply tear or damage the paper, take it back to the elections officer, ask for a new ballot, and fill that out instead. We make it as hard as possible to coerce a vote while maintaining secret voting (noting that it is definitely still possible, just hard).
Are there no polling stations where you can submit the ballot in a private location, like a drop box inside a booth or whatever? In the US I've only voted electronically, and it's done in a private booth with a curtain preventing external visibility, so somebody can easily video record the entire process with no realistic way of altering their vote.
No, the booths where you fill out your ballot are on one side of the room, and the ballot boxes are on the other, supervised by an election officer, and near the exit. You:
- collect blank ballots (usually 2 pieces of paper, one for the House, one for the Senate) at the entry,
- walk over to the booth,
- fill out your ballot in secret at the booth (taking as long as you like),
- fold the ballots,
- walk over to the ballot boxes,
- drop the folded ballots into the corresponding box (House ballot in the House box and Senate ballot in the Senate box),
- then leave.
As no-one sees what you write at the booth, you can vote legally, draw pictures on your ballot, write obscenities, write nothing, or a combination.
Interesting. Sounds like a solid system.