Editor,
Irv Brenner (June 2) and Neil Wild (May 27) raise important points about California voting, but neither mentions the biggest problem with our vote-by-mail system: It enables voters to prove how they have voted — ending the secret ballot, which made both coercion and vote-selling impossible.
With vote-by-mail, an abusive manager, spouse or union steward can — with threat of violence — demand to see your ballot, or demand that you hand over your signed blank ballot.
Similarly, vote-by-mail makes it easy to sell your vote as a signed blank ballot. We will soon have exact numbers, but Tom Steyer seems poised to spend more than $200 million for less than 2 million votes — more than $100 per vote. Would you hand over a signed blank ballot for, say, $50? What if you support the candidate or are indifferent?
You might argue that these hypotheticals never occur, but how would you know? The parties involved have good reason to keep the activity secret.
In his classic work “The Strategy of Conflict,” Thomas Schelling wrote that “political democracy itself depends ... on the mandatory secrecy” of the vote. Previous generations understood this, and set a high bar for “absentee” voting. Alas, the lesson is forgotten.
Jonathan Seder
Palo Alto
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(1) comment
Jonathan - our voting system is subject to almost innumerable opportunities for manipulation. Your attention to coerced voting using the paper ballot is another twist that I had not even contemplated. If we can't have secret balloting, the whole system is a joke. During the Covid 19 era, we were even instructed in the vote centers to waive signature and some address verification. Needless to say, voter ID was already discarded. Until we have a top to bottom review of the entire process by an apolitical institution, we might as well accept the status quo, fraud and discrepancies on steroids and we are stuck with the same predictable election outcomes .
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