[EL] Secret signatures and secret ballots

[Volokh, Eugene]

	Here I thought I was being realistic, and now it turns out that I'm engaging in propaganda and unhealthy kinds of statements.  Yet at the risk of further unhealthy statements, let me elaborate a bit further:

	Whenever we are contemplating policy choices, it seems at least legitimate -- and often quite useful -- to have a sense of what the available options are going to be.  If, for instance, one is trying to figure out what to do about drug policy, one could simply urge immediate decriminalization of all drugs, including heroin, crystal meth, and so on -- or one could assume that this is politically off the table, and try to figure out what the options are given the political constraints that we are indeed likely to face.  And that's so even if one is positive that total decriminalization is the right solution (a matter on which I'm uncertain, but which I'll assume for purposes of this hypothetical).  That strikes me as healthy pragmatism, not unhealthy propaganda.

	Likewise, if the question is what the marginal costs are of the secret ballot (which I support, incidentally) compared to the marginal costs of some degree of secrecy in initiative petition signing (which I also support), it seems to me helpful to think about the pluses and minuses of each option while holding the other legal rules invariant, rather than putting on the table a possible (but I think implausible) abolition of absentee voting.  Perhaps taking such an approach, rather than assuming that all the other possible rule changes are also on the table, is actually a pretty healthy way of approaching matters.

	Eugene

> -----Original Message-----
> From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:law-election-
> bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Bev Harris
> Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2011 3:31 PM
> To: law-election at uci.edu
> Subject: Re: [EL] Secret signatures and secret ballots
> 
> Below is an example of a propaganda technique called asserting the
> foregone
> conclusion (yep, it's given its own heading in the manuals I've seen, one of
> which was created for the U.S. military):
> 
> >                 But given that we do have absentee voting, and are unlikely
> > to stop having it
> 
> This is not a healthy kind of statement for a society that values public action,
> but it's a great statement to dissuade a population from trying to do
> anything.
> 
> Just one more point; whereas Mr. Volokh indicates that absentee voting can
> produce fraud in the form of a vote-buying scheme, the larger fraud in
> absentee
> voting takes place when someone with inside access inserts votes into the
> pool
> using the names of legitimate but irregular voters, without their knowledge.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Bev Harris
> Founder - Black Box Voting
> http://www.blackboxvoting.org
> 
> * * * * *
> 
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> them to
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> the
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> 
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