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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   27655 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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I've never seen a ballot that has anything more local than city elections, so I can't imagine how it would be a privacy issue unless you've got a city of like ten people. I doubt that intersecting the city and senate district or whatever will result in a small set of people.

City, county, legislative district, port commissioners, hospital districts, judges, statewide office, federal.

The city is wholly contained in the county, so that adds no information. Same likely goes for judges and many statewide offices. Never seen elections for hospital districts.

Cities can spill over into multiple counties and judicial districts can be quite small. A ballot for Townsville city council district 123 but also justice of the peace for place XYZ and school board members for ABCISD and a county road maintenance bond for a county that only 10% of the city crosses into can be a very, very small intersection of people. But otherwise I do agree with you, the actual ballot is secret which is largely good enough and really it wouldn't take much effort otherwise to guess which way a given voter voted based on precinct counts, demographics, and party registration/donation.

I happen to live in the corners of a school district, city council district, city limits, and state and federal legislative districts. The exact set I vote for would narrow it down to maybe a square mile. I guess I can't speak to whether this is a median experience in the US.

Wait, there's no reason that your entire ballot needs to be published, right? Publishing the vote tallies for each race separately is sufficient. If there's no association between the choices you make in each race I hardly see the privacy concerns.

I don't think it needs to be, but OP's scenario with hand counts of everything that anyone can watch presumably means others can see it. Maybe if you literally diced them up into sets for each race, or something. But maintaining a secret ballot and open accountability simultaneously isn't always an easy task.

Ballots are already multiple pages, you could easily split it into enough pages so that no page could identify anyone.

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