Can my husband find out who I am voting for in the Presidential Election?"
Olivia Dreizen Howell, the founder of a website to help women get back on their feet after a breakup or divorce, tweeted last week, “We’ve been getting this question a lot,” so she followed up with some facts. As the Washington Post confirmed with experts, the answer is simple: “No; it will be public record that you voted, but not how you filled out your ballot.”
The GOP ticket is led by a sexual predator who a jury found “‘raped’ [journalist E. Jean Carroll] as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” the judge in the case wrote. His running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, has called for a national abortion ban, wrote the forward to a book that denounced contraception for making pregnancy “seem like an optional and not natural result of having sex,” and repeatedly called women who haven’t given birth “sociopathic” and “childless cat ladies.”
Meanwhile, the Democratic ticket is led by a woman who chose “Freedom” by Beyoncé as her campaign song, and has dispensed with the mealy-mouthed language about abortion rights to declare she stands for “the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body.” Her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, her running mate, has decried “weird” MAGA Republicans of the “he-man woman haters’ club.”
And THIS is why unlimited vote by mail isn’t as great as some people think.
Why?
Just going to preface this by saying that I absolutely do support vote by mail, it’s objectively a good thing
However, there’s a problem that should be considered in that it can create opportunities for coerced voting either within a household, or by requiring someone to send a photo of their form.
The former being more of a problem than the later
But you can make that argument about anything…
Can’t have salads because they could be used for voter coercion?
Where should a just and equal society draw the line, though? A person’s partner can also use Life360 (or another app) to monitor their whereabouts and prohibit them from getting a job so they can’t save up money to escape - does that mean we shouldn’t have phones or that tracking apps should be restricted?
In a country like the US, where voting lines can literally be 8 hours long and employers don’t have to pay you while you take time during the day to vote, can you guys afford to limit mail-in voting due to extremely specific scenarios in which abuse may occur?
It appears (from my position as someone who has not been in an abusive relationship) like we could more comprehensively tackle this issue with legislation that covers more situations that are directly coercive in nature (like your mail-in ballot being tampered with, regardless of your consent).
At the same time, I am a bit of an idiot, so I do genuinely want to read your perspective about how you think things should be. I am almost certainly not considering every avenue here, given that I lack first-hand experience with abusive relationships and have only really heard stories from friends and family (some of whom do have first- or second-hand experience).
It is not my intent to equate “x has problem y” with “x should not exist” very good systems can and do get abused and misused.
There’s a reason I started my comment with
All I’m saying is that maybe there should be a way for people to go back and override their votes (which admittedly could probably also be abused in some situations), or better yet, just better social safety nets to help people get out of those situations. I’m not suggesting I have all of the answers, just acknowledging that the person at the top of the thread raises a valid, if possibly overstated, concern.
Because your abusive spouse/preacher/etc. can make you show your ballot, or even mark it for you.
You can still go vote in person.
I think you don’t appreciate abusive and controlling relationships for how bad they can be
a) some states are pure vote by mail. b) if you have the option of voting at home, that exact same abuser can make you exercise it.
I used to oppose VBM because of this. Now I see it as a trade off since there are also benefits that can outweigh the problems. But a person with their eyes open should not pretend that the problems don’t exist.
Which states? I am not aware of any that are solely vote by mail.
If you wanted to, it would be easy to screw up your ballot request. Throw it out when you get it, mess up the form, forget to sign, offer to take it to the post office and never mail it… Then it’s “oh no it never came, let’s just go vote in person”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_voting_in_the_United_States#All_vote-by-mail
And, the existence of methods to escape abusers prevents some instances of abuse, but doesn’t eliminate the problem.
From the article you linked
Yes, that is California. In the exact same paragraph, other states are listed which don’t offer the option. Oregon was the one that came to my mind immediately.
The issue is, having an option to do something the right way is not all that helpful. If there is an option to do it the wrong way, attackers (using “attacker” in the sense of computer security) will do what they can to make you use that option, so they can exploit it. Therefore, security systems should make doing the wrong thing impossible, rather than merely making the right thing possible.
What do you mean by that?
See the discussion? VBM means you fill in your ballot at home, while your husband potentially watches. As opposed to voting with a secret ballot in a voting booth with the curtain closed.