The paper ballots used in Lehigh County’s election Tuesday tackled a modern concern about the integrity of electronic voting systems. But the return to pen and paper raised anew a centuries-old question about the right to cast a secret ballot.
At the Washington Township polling station where Lauren Ganser votes and serves as a poll worker, voters were directed to long banquet tables in the fire hall to complete their ballots in the open. Then they stood in line to give the ballots to poll workers to be scanned and recorded.
Throughout the process, Ganser said, she felt as if her most private decisions were open for anyone in the room to see.
“I clearly can tell anybody who I voted for, but when I’m making my selections, I don’t want anybody looking over my shoulder,” she said. “It’s my own private and personal selection.”
Among the nearly 50,000 people in Lehigh County who cast ballots Tuesday, Ganser wasn’t alone in feeling that her vote was exposed.
“I didn’t have a private ballot,” said Fountain Hill Mayor Carolee Gifford, who complained that an election worker appeared to scrutinize her choices before scanning her ballot. “There wasn’t even the premise of privacy.”
Others complained in Facebook posts that tables with dividers provided some privacy but were too small to place the ballots on.
Election officials last week acknowledged shortcomings in poll worker training and privacy provisions. Voters could request a folder to keep their ballots private, Tim Benyo, chief clerk of elections, said. He also noted that if voters completed ballots in the open, it was because they chose not to use the partitioned tables.
“My miscalculation was that the path of least resistance wasn’t for them to wait for those booths,” Benyo said.
Fair election watchdogs said the reports from voters raise a significant concern about violations of a right enshrined in Article 7 Section 4 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, added in 1901, which allows flexibility in how ballots are cast, “provided that secrecy in voting be preserved.”
The notion that voters must choose or ask for privacy is not good enough, said Vic Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.
“It’s the responsibility of the government to protect them,” he said.
While the ACLU, routinely sues government agencies to head off or end constitutional violations, Walczak said it’s too early to say whether that will be necessary in counties where new voting systems misfired.
“If there are problems in the spring that may well prompt more emergent action such as litigation,” he said.
Benyo declined to comment on the possibility that the privacy shortfalls were a constitutional violation.
Privacy wasn’t always expected in voting, said Diana Mutz, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania.
In olden times, ballots were cast by putting papers in separate boxes for each candidate, making it clear to anyone watching how a person voted.
“It was considered a public statement of solidarity,” Mutz said. “It was definitely seen as a means of showing who you are allied with. That’s not something today’s public is expecting.”
Secret ballots gained popularity in the mid 1800s as governments fought against the practice of buying or coercing votes, said David Thornburgh, director of the Committee of Seventy, a nonpartisan civic leadership group.
More than 100 years after the requirement to maintain secrecy in voting became part of the Pennsylvania Constitution, it has become a bedrock principle of election integrity.
A loss of privacy in elections could lead to reduced participation, Mutz said.
“People value their social relationships and don’t want politics to interfere with those,” Mutz said. “If there is a potential that their vote won’t be private, that’s pretty offputting to most people.”
But technology is putting the sanctity of secret ballots at risk, the government watchdog group Common Cause noted in a report released in conjunction with the Verified Voting Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Every state provides the right to a secret ballot, but as more states allow votes to be cast over the internet, voters lose that right, as it is impossible to guarantee anonymity with ballots submitted over the internet, the report says. Pennsylvania is not among the 32 states that allow internet voting.
The authors of the report recommend that states use the internet not for casting ballots but to make it easy for people to register and to receive blank absentee ballots that can be printed and returned by mail.
Lehigh County’s secret ballot issues, while potentially serious, could be solved with better training for election board workers and improved communication with voters, said Thornburgh, noting that those are perennial issues across Pennsylvania.
Benyo said that while he plans tangible changes, such as the deployment of privacy screens, he expects future elections to run more smoothly as workers and voters become more familiar with the system.
“There are definitely lessons learned, and moving forward, things will go better,” he said.
Morning Call reporter Peter Hall can be reached at 610-820-6581; peter.hall@mcall.com.
