iN DEFENSE OF VOTING PRECINCTS
Countywide Voting, Ballot Secrecy and an Auditable Paper Trail
True representation is achieved through representative "districts" within each states. These districts must contain similar numbers of voters statewide for equal and accurate representation of state populations. Districts can be wholly within a county, or may span more than one county. Districts are further broken down into smaller political subdivisions, the most granular of which is known as a "voting precinct" and is assigned to the smallest grouping of voters in a county.
Voting precincts dictate which ballot style a voter will recieve (this means which races are on the voter's ballot based on their address, assigned voting precinct, other political subdivisions), and also help a counties understand which voters, and how many, to expect to turnout at the polls.
Prior to the practice of allowing voters to vote anywhere across the county, casting ballots was done by precinct. Whether a county places a polling location in every precinct, or combines precincts into convenient polling locations, each precinct's ballots were naturally cast together. Currently, all states who practice countywide voting are still required to report election results by voting precinct.
Allowing voters to cast votes countywide facilitates widespread violation of voters right to secret ballot. This is due to the necessity to report precinct totals from each race, requiring all voters who vote outside of their voting precinct to have their ballots and ballot choices identified to be tied back to their voting precinct for reporting. There is a file created for all voters tying their ballots and choices back to their precinct due to the need to report precinct totals.
When this issue was discovered, election officials chose to redact what are supposed to be anonymous ballots, public records, rather than help everyone understand the issue and how it can be eliminated through best practices for both election day and early voting. This is an additional violation of state and federal open records laws.
Casting ballots by precinct and assigning voters a convenient location to cast all precinct ballots together does eliminate the violation of ballot secrecy, a state and federal mandate, save if the voter votes by mail and is the only voter from their precinct to do so, by keeping all precinct ballots together, removing the need to reconcile any voter's ballot selections for reporting.
U.S. voters can be guaranteed both ballot secrecy and auditability if ballots are cast by voting precinct, the lowest level of granularity in U.S. election results.
Case Law: SEWELL et al. v. CHAMBERS et al. No. 14929. Feb. 27, 1948.
"We have a wholesome rule of law that the secret ballot be not treated lightly. However, there are public interests which outweigh the individual's right to have his ballot kept secret. ‘The stability of our government is dependent upon the honesty and purity of the ballot the secrecy of the ballot had better be scattered to the four winds, rather than have such secrecy shield corruption in elections, * * * better a thousand times that the individual's vote should be spread upon canvas under calcium light, than that fraud should be locked up within the lids of official ballot boxes and poll books with no known legal method of exposing such fruad.’ Gantt v. Brown et al., 238 Mo. 560, 142 S.W. 422, 425.""
Redaction of allegedly anonymous ballots to alleviate the civil rights violation, though it does violate additional public records law at both the state and federal level.
Ballot secrecy is held at high importance, however the law mandates an auditable paper trail take precedence over ballot secrecy when fraud is justly suspected.
Auditability comes first. Redaction of public records destroys the auditable paper trail, facilitating fraud without detection.