Beyond that, the system is clearly geared towards increasing participation and enfranchising as many people as possible (a good thing in a democratic system).
Voting is county by county, and it is run by human beings that make mistakes, but in the dozens of times I have voted the secrecy of my ballot has been entirely up to me. Party affiliation is not a secret, true, it is a public record. But the actual Please provide a lot more context than "how easy it can be" or please delete your post.
The ballot counting device has a locked compartment where the inserted ballots are kept. Only the inspector for the location has the key (although this may be handed to another worker when the inspector takes a break). This compartment has a numbered tamper seal placed on it, and this seal is checked throughout the day and its number is re-recorded each time.
Provisional ballots and mail-in ballots are similarly protected. They aren’t behind a locked compartment, but the boxes they go into are again sealed with tamper-evident seals that are—again—numbered and regularly checked.
Of course, no system is perfect and inspectors are undertrained (a few hours of training once every other year or so), overloaded at times, and human. As someone in security as my day job though, I’d say the measures in place to prevent tampering, fraud, and ballot disclosure are reasonably sound.
Source: I am an SF election inspector.
CO has universal mailings. You mail (or drop off) your ballot in a double envelope, and only the outer envelope carries identifying information. One workstation examines the outer envelope to track who voted, and a different workstation processes the anonymous ballots. It requires a little more trust on the part of the voter, but also encourages more participation.
Dropping a mail-in ballot in person seemed to have no plausible subreptitious election integrity attack I could think of though.
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.
Source: am an SF election inspector.
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.
I do quite like that permanent residents like me are allowed to be a poll worker in SF...
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.
Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_primaries_in_the_United_S... it looks like 17 states have completely open primaries. 4 more are like Massachusetts. 3 more have open or semi-open primaries on the Democratic side only.
I was struck when the article said they were asking party affiliation before voting.
>> The voter approaches their table, and gives their name and party affiliation. The party affiliation is used as a signal that something fishy might be going on if the ratio of R to D is very different from the votes recorded.
Wtf? You can vote in secret but you gotta tell us who you voted with?
It is a big deal in that it psychologically reinforces the mindset that you should be aligned with a party. Instead of voting for a candidate on the basis of their policies and merit.
Maybe it's because we generally don't expect our votes to be revealed, nor do we expect serious repercussions if they were.
If things change so that either/both of those things stop being true, we'd probably see a push for better anonymity.
As a sibling comment mentions, states and cities have a great deal of freedom in terms of the "how" of voting and some do it better than others.
Once the ballot is in the box, disassociated from the voter then there is no more secrecy concerns.
There are plenty of towns where "everyone knows everyone" and a system that requires trust on poll workers in this aspect is a bit alien to me. For example, one system I am familiar with the ballot itself is not special, the envelope is (it has signatures from the poll workers, which is also problematic because they can potentially surreptitiously mark the envelope in a special way to associate the vote to a specific person), which makes it unnecessary for poll workers to ever be in contact with the ballots themselves.
Overall, my qualms are minimal and am more concerned about the use of computers for the vote than anything else in the process.
Obviously that's harder to do with mail ballots, because we have to be able to discern that one voter submitted one ballot. (and my state also allows people to track their mail-in ballot)
Or do you mean you have to verify that the ballot is actually submitted after the name is crossed off?
Quick edit: It's $500 to get data for everyone in the state, but there might be an extra fee if you want to know when they voted