Vote Selling: Harder Than You Would Think July 4, 2008
Posted by Richard Carback and in : Voting Policy , trackbackAccording to one Minnesota voter’s story:
A college student claimed it was all a joke when he put his vote in this fall’s presidential election up for sale on the Web auction site eBay. But prosecutors didn’t see the humor.
Back in 2000 there was a website specifically for selling votes, but that was taken down fairly quickly, too. Surely, a widespread black market off-shore shop might be possible, but succeeding with this sort of thing usually requires a confidential and limited approach.
The vote selling issue has always been interesting to me. Obviously, it should not possible to make a proof of sale, because that opens the system up to other forms of coercion. However, if you can’t confirm compliance, is there anything to worry about?
My opinion is that these laws should still exist, for two reasons. First, privacy is really hard to guarantee with a voting system, and you can still get lesser forms of “proof” (e.g. cellphone picture of ballot–can be faked but still might be enough). Second, I (weakly) disagree with the major argument that I have heard for vote selling, which is that candidates are buying votes with their positions and promises anyway. Otherwise non-voting voters affect the process for more interested voters. I think that anything that makes a voter change his vote other than the opinion of the candidate is probably wrong.
I am still writing part 3 of the secret ballot series, and I should be finished soon. Have a happy 4th of July!
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Comments»
This story also made http://detentionslip.org. A great site for crazy headlines like this.
Even a genuine cell phone ballot image is very weak proof indeed, because the ballot could have been spoiled outside of the voting booth.
Alas, this property does not hold for ballots with publicly posted serial numbers. But for better or for worse, the American public under-appreciates the importance of this drawback, as evidenced by the growing popularity of absentee ballots.
I believe that this drawback is correctable at a cost, in particular because intaglio printing is difficult to verify from a photograph. On the other hand, whether the benefit justifies the cost is open to debate.
There are (usually) a limited number of times you could spoil a ballot. The cell phone “proof” would involve different marks on how ever many spoiled ballots are needed, plus a final “valid” ballot. You could still simply not vote, though, but there might be a different way to prove that you had or had not voted.
An easier way to avoid it is to just photoshop the ballot however you’d like. The low quality cell phone cameras makes this a possibility.
Personally, i’d like to see a “ballot creator” in every polling place, which would allow you to print/mark/photo any ballot you wanted. That would also deal with the serial number attack, presumably you could put any serial number you wanted on it.