But if you want to participate more in the elections than just R vs D, say, decide which candidate R or D should elect, then you land in a public registry, no?
It's not just party affiliation (which is public I think in at least most states) but also the procedures in place for discarding incorrectly filled ballots. Poll workers need to recover them and mark them as voided. It is not terrible, but it has a lower threshold of security than other electoral systems I am familiar with.
Dropping a mail-in ballot in person seemed to have no plausible subreptitious election integrity attack I could think of though.
At least in California, all of these voided ballots are counted at the end of the day and tallied with the number of recorded ballots, the number of ballots issued, the number of ballots remaining, and the number of people who physically showed up to vote.
To be honest, the numbers are always off by 1-5 (in a precinct of ~1,500 registered voters, with ~100 physical ballots cast) simply because poll workers are generally undertrained and out-of-practice so mistakes are made throughout the day. But the system at least does a decent job of limiting the amount of fraud that could happen at a single polling location. And there are hundreds throughout the city.
We were off by few in one of the crosschecks for a while. Turned out to just be voided mail-in ballots that in-person voters dropped off, which aren't supposed to be counted in the respective field. Which the manual doesn't really state (but one can infer it, it's clearly to ensure the total number of unused + used in person ballots match the supplied ballots). That manual could use some tightening...
I do quite like that permanent residents like me are allowed to be a poll worker in SF...
My concern here isn't around integrity of the vote but secrecy of the vote for a given person in this event. It might just be that this is so different from what I've seen in other systems that it stood out.
Virginia here, but this should apply anywhere paper ballots are used. The voter is free to mark the ballot they hand back to be spoiled and replaced any way they want, including in a manner that obscures who they voted for. The ideal marking if someone was concerned about this would be to go through and check every box for every candidate before handing it in to be spoiled.
There are systems where the ballot itself isn't special, but the envelope you use is. Because of that there's no need to account for the ballots themselves. Poll workers never interact with your vote, you place the filled envelope in the ballot box, just like dropping off mail-in ballots work here.
Ah, yeah. I do agree that that's a weakness here: you hand your ballots to the poll worker, they void it out, and that's placed into a bin to be counted at the end of the day.
Potentially a poll worker could use that opportunity to look at your ballot and see who you voted for. Perhaps it would be better if you were allowed to tear the ballot in half yourself and drop it into the slot but there may be a reason why it's not done that way.
It depends on the state. For example, Massachussetts has semi-open primaries. If you're registered R and show up at the primary, you get an R ballot. If you're registered D, you get a D ballot. If you're registered "Unaffiliated", they ask you which ballot you'd like. That would be something like 55% of MA voters, last I checked.
While you can register as a member of one particular party in order to vote in that party's primary election, you certainly don't have to, and it has nothing to do with how you vote in the general election. In some states, even if you are "unaffiliated" you can participate in one party's primary in that state as well.
