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.”

  • @recklessengagement
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    4427 days ago

    As someone who’s worked multiple elections, your ballot is never tied to your name/ID. Even if someone broke into the box and stole the ballots, there’s no way to know whos is who.

    When ballots are audited/recounted, its based on things like the number of ballots vs the number of recorded voters, the signature of the precinct officer, and the qualities of the ballot itself. No identifying informationm.

    • @Dkarma
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      327 days ago

      This is not even remotely true for mail in ballots. They are returned in an envelope that has your name, address and signature on it.

      • @andrewta
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        27 days ago

        Honest question : on mail in ballots even though you name is on the envelope, doesn’t the envelope get separated from the ballot? So there is no real way to know who voted for whom? @[email protected]

        • @[email protected]
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          fedilink
          627 days ago

          My state mail in procedure is to send your ballot in an envelope without identifying info, and that envelope goes inside a larger envelope so they can verify you. I assume they separate it for counting later

          • @[email protected]
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            fedilink
            727 days ago

            I have worked elections too. Can confirm. The ballot is separated from identifying info once validated.

      • @recklessengagement
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        227 days ago

        True, but once they are recieved, they’re seperated from the identifying information. It’s not stored in a database somewhere.

        The only time I’d argue this isn’t the case would be for provisional ballots, where they often will send you a letter after it gets processed.