Should Secret Voting Be Mandatory?. James Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ in multiple nations (Gronke et al. 2008). These policies – including postal voting, on-demand absentee balloting, early voting in person, and internet voting – aim to lower the “cost” of voting and thereby increase participation. They have become relatively common.

These responses to the retreat of democracy are by turns fatalist and naive. We reject the first and advocate a better way to accomplish the second. There are good general reasons to reject technocratic fatalism and to instead endorse a considerably more robust conception of democratic politics, including more inclusive popular electoral participation. Suffice to say here that we think both that elites and experts have themselves contributed to skepticism about democracy and that there are democratic ways to address that skepticism. We do not rehearse those general arguments here (Knight and Johnson 2011; Orr and Johnson 2019). Instead, we follow those who seek more robust democratic participation but argue for a more effective route to that end. Rather than making voting more convenient, we advocate that voting in person by secret ballot be made compulsory.

Our proposal resists fatalism yet aims to infuse some realism into proposals for increasing participation. Flatly, we oppose widespread adoption of policies that make voting more convenient. Why? First, there is little evidence that such initiatives expand participation in inclusive ways. But, more importantly, such measures threaten electoral integrity. It is not difficult to fathom how they might do so. They undermine ballot secrecy that was introduced to foreclose intimidation and bribery of voters – practices which are starting to reemerge. Consider vote-by-mail schemes. In recent elections in the United States and United Kingdom, for instance, between a fifth and a quarter of all votes were cast by mail. Imagine that your employer offers to witness your ballot and then mail it on your behalf. Or perhaps your landlord generously sends someone to collect your ballot along with your rent and requests you leave the former inside the unsealed envelope containing the latter. Perhaps you are an immigrant with limited language skills and a political party sends an operative to your door to help you complete your ballot. Or consider the partner or children of an abuser who demands the family sit together at the kitchen table to complete their ballots. These scenarios are hardly fanciful and we provide examples of such behavior in the text. Here the point simply is that the ways in which convenience-voting initiatives promise to encourage participation operate at odds with both inclusion and integrity.

If we hope to reinvigorate democratic politics, we should not make voting “convenient”; we should make it mandatory. Advocates of what commonly is called compulsory voting often endorse it as a way to increase participation that, since it requires all voters to go to the polls, also is inclusive. Such arguments are important. However, we focus our argument elsewhere. We support making voting mandatory because, in tandem with the secret ballot, it promotes electoral integrity. We argue that this can help offset declining confidence in democratic politics by dramatically expanding democratic participation in ways that recognize the intimate connections between inclusion and integrity in electoral politics. Simply put, we argue that voting must be both secret and mandatory.

      We present our argument in three parts. In chapter 1, we address conceptual and theoretical matters. We introduce the idea of non-domination as our basic normative criterion. We then focus on the strategic structure of the secret ballot. We demonstrate how the secret ballot protects individuals from intimidation and bribery – what we call electoral domination – by restricting their ability to credibly reveal how they voted. As such, the protection that the secret ballot affords restricts individual freedom in one way in order to protect individuals from those who might seek to engage in electoral domination. We also underscore that voting secrecy effectively protects voters only when it is obligatory. That, in turn, requires that voting be controlled and administered by public officials.

In chapter 2, we relate the historical struggle to implement and refine ballot secrecy. Our account highlights the variety, efficacy, and limits of the institution. The design features and rules embodied in the most effective form of the secret ballot – in what is known as the “Australian ballot” – resulted from that historical struggle. They are intended to remedy lapses in secrecy when voting is left in the hands of private actors (e.g., party functionaries or their agents) rather than being controlled by public officials. We also establish how, historically, those bent on exercising electoral domination resort to attempting to buy or suppress turnout once the secret ballot has created an impediment to directly interfering with voting. Our first two chapters show why the secret ballot is necessary to protect voters from illicit interference as they seek to formulate and express their political preferences. They also show why the protections it affords are far from sufficient.

Our final chapter builds on this theoretical and historical groundwork. We argue that popular reforms aimed at enhancing inclusion by making it more convenient to vote threaten even such protection as the secret ballot provides. Politically, this creates the erroneous impression that an unavoidable tension exists between inclusion and electoral integrity. And it is the reason why we recommend making voting mandatory. This is a more effective way to promote inclusion than the family of reforms we criticize. But, more importantly, it complements and sustains the protections that the secret ballot offers to voters. Like the secret ballot, it infringes on the liberty of voters in one way in order to protect them from electoral domination. In this instance, it inoculates voters from attempts to buy or suppress turnout. We show that any apparent tension between promoting inclusive participation and protecting voter choice is entirely avoidable.

      In short, when implemented in tandem, a pair of institutions – the secret ballot and compulsory voting – which may initially seem to reduce individual freedom in fact effectively protect individual voters from domination. That, we believe, is an important step in restoring popular confidence in elections and in democratic politics.

Notes

1 Freedom House (2019). “Democracy in Retreat: Freedom in the World 2019.” Freedom House. (https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2019/democracy-retreat) 2 R. S. Foa, A. Klassen, M. Slade, A. Rand, and R. Collins (2020). “The Global Satisfaction with Democracy Report 2020.” Cambridge, United Kingdom: Centre for the Future of Democracy.

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