Punchscan

The ‘Lawonomics’ of the Secret Ballot July 11, 2008

Posted by Aleks Essex in : Legislation, Privacy , trackback

The great Freakonom, Steven Levitt, argues that the market price of vote selling is effectively zero because of its essentially insignificant weighting in the outcome.

Of course I agree entirely with Ben Adida’s take: the price is effectively zero because the transaction cannot be verified as having been fulfilled.

The design of E2E receipts completely revolves around this idea, and we spend a lot of time on it. It’s also why E2E voting via the internet is such a hard nut to crack.How can you possibly enforce ballot secrecy in that environment? How can you even enforce it in a polling place?

There is another dimension to it that I wanted to talk about.

If you already have a law against vote selling, do you really need the additional enforcement mechanism (booths, envelopes, etc) at the polling place?

Many other criminal laws do not lean on an additional physical protection measure to prevent the crime; being caught and punished is enough.

There’s no particular physical measure preventing someone from robbing someone of $10 (the minimum bid of the ebay vote selling incident), presumably just the risk of a jail term.

Consider a related situation. In Canada (obviously where there is no HAVA) you can assist someone in voting as long as you sign a statutory declaration that you won’t tell anyone how that person voted. The idea being, yes, you could do it, but you have the legal incentive not to, especially that you’re on record. The Crown probably couldn’t even prove the offense in most situations. And yet this measure seems to be effective enough that no cases come to mind.

You can also (again via a statutory declaration) vote at a polling place without being on the voter list. Presumably you just could go around from poll to poll casting ballots. But it’s ultimately the ‘lawonomics’ — the cost of going to jail weighed against the benefit of stuffing 3 or 4 ballots — that seems to prevent this.

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