[EL] “Fact-checking William Barr: Is your vote no longer secret with mail-in ballots?”

[D. A. Holtzman]

I’ve seen one place where “people involved can find out and know how” 
some people voted.  In the vote centers using Los Angeles County’s new 
voting system, poll workers (the county uses the compound word 
“pollworker” - does anywhere else?) take the ballots out of the machines 
at the end of each day.  The ballots land in each machine’s collection 
box in the order they were cast.  Poll workers generally take them out 
all at once as stacked.  The ballots have votes written on them in plain 
English.  Poll workers can easily tell how the first or last two or 
three voters on a certain machine voted as they count the ballots, as it 
seems they are supposed to do.  Observers might see some votes too if 
the workers place piles of ballots face up on tables.  I saw a Trump and 
a Bloomberg without really trying while watching a vote center’s daily 
closing during a very brief tour of such centers.

The County’s old InkaVote Plus system had a very limited “Stevie Wonder” 
flaw.  That is, if a blind voter, say Stevie Wonder, used the audio 
ballot booth (I believe he did), his votes would be cast on curly 
thermal paper instead of the regular cardstock computer cards.  That 
thermal paper would stand out and be easy for a poll worker to look at 
when the ballot box was dumped out at the end of Election Day.

In vote-by-mail processing, I believe ballots are extracted from 
envelopes in two steps: once out of signed outside envelopes, then later 
out of security sleeves.  - dah


On 9/14/2020 8:19 AM, Rick Hasen wrote:
>
>
>     “Fact-checking William Barr: Is your vote no longer secret with
>     mail-in ballots?” <https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115043>
>
> Posted on September 11, 2020 3:33 pm 
> <https://electionlawblog.org/?p=115043>by *Rick Hasen* 
> <https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
>
> CNN 
> <https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/11/politics/barr-secret-vote-fact-check/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_allpolitics+%28RSS%3A+CNN+-+Politics%29>:
>
> /[..]/
>
> /“There’s no more secret vote, there’s no secret vote,” Barr said 
> <https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/u-s-attorney-general-barr-attacks-voting-by-mail-while-in-arizona>. 
> “Your name is associated with a particular ballot. The government and 
> the people involved can find out and know how you voted. And it opens 
> up the door to coercion.”/
>
> /[...]/


-- 
Simple Instant Runoff Election Ballot
(Ranked Choice Voting)

Candidates you want to vote for, in the order you prefer them:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
(...)

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