Traceable Ballots

A great idea, right? The notion that every ballot in an election be electronically tagged in such a way that each voter can later follow up to ensure that their ballot was properly counted. How very democratic. How very reassuring.

The good folks who brought you fake news, stolen elections, Italian spy satellites and Jewish space lasers are now proposing technology to enable each voter to reach back to ensure that his or her vote was properly counted. In that way, every citizen can vet the accuracy of the election, at least on a personal level. The ultimate guardian against election fraud, right?

Well, not quite. Here’s the catch: if the good guys (with or without guns) can trace their votes, so can the bad guys, with only a modicum of tech skill, or at least access to a decent Russian hacker.

Let’s not be naive– if the banks and the Pentagon can be hacked, why not your ballot?
The real question then becomes: how keen are you to have your friends, your enemies, your neighbours, or your government know exactly how you voted? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

If we want to know what it looks like to have your vote publicly shared, we need only look back a century and a half to when our country was young. In those days ballots were traceable. Very, very, traceable. And there were consequences.

Long before such niceties as secret ballots, votes for women, and all those other prissy notions, the vote was so much simpler. It went like this.

In each community, property-owning males of the age of twenty-one and over would gather en masse to vote. In those days, there were no rules preventing the offering favours, and the favourite favour was whisky– as much as you could drink. I’m sure you can see where this is going.

In front of this alcohol-fuelled mob, each candidate would make a final impassioned speech, or at least attempt to do so. With the crowd now sufficiently inflamed, the roll call vote would begin.

As each voter’s name was called, he would shout out his preferred candidate, usually with some incendiary comment. Each vote would be recorded on a board for all to see– the ultimate in transparency! Even at that, amid the confusion and uproar, it was not unknown for the recorder to enter the wrong name, according to his personal preferences.

As you might imagine, these whisky-soaked polls usually degenerated into brawls, often spilling out into the streets with further mayhem, including, in 1849, the burning down of the parliament buildings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_the_Parliament_Buildings_in_Montreal) . In the cold grey of the next morning, lawsuits began and criminal charges were laid.

But at least the votes were traceable. And the lawyers were kept busy.

So there you have it– that’s what democracy looks like when the ballot isn’t secret.

(A good argument could also be made that broadening the franchise to include women and non-property owners, lowering the threshold age, and generally encouraging rather than discouraging representation, has been good for democracy. But that’s for another day.)