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Comment by derektank | Hacker News Reader

Yet so few people go the next step and say, “Let’s do away with the secret ballot itself.” It really is a recent invention, American democracy survived nearly 100 years before the Australian ballot was adopted. There are obviously concerns (vote buying, organized crime, etc) but they can be dealt with. And public voting would almost completely eliminate concerns about the voting process itself being subverted by a malign actor.

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> There are obviously concerns (vote buying, organized crime, etc) but they can be dealt with.

I don't think they can be dealt with. But I'm willing to listen to your ideas. How would you deal with vote buying? How would you stop the scenario where a guy says "I'll give you $1,000 if you vote for candidate X" (or "I know where you live, I'll break your kneecaps if you vote for candidate Y")?

I mean, the same way we deal with corruption, bribery, and threats generally; have a strong, independent law enforcement and prosecutors office. The FBI regularly and successfully investigates (and the DoJ indicts and secures convictions for) legislators, whose voting record is already public, who sell their votes on city councils or in state legislatures. It takes a lot of votes to swing most elections, so a concerted bribery campaign would be much easier to investigate than these examples.

Are you confident that Trump's FBI and DOJ (and Trump-aligned state police/prosecutors; if you are a Trump supporter, please substitute in the names of your most distrusted democrats) would vigorously pursue all credible allegations of vote-buying and coercion in his favour? And even if you are, and they did, do you think more than ~half the country would believe it?

As elections are run by the states, you can have state and local governments legislate anti-corruption law and enforce it too. So, no, no real concerns with who specifically is in charge at the federal level at any given time

Vote buying/intimidation is just too big a vector, IMO. I would never accept that risk. It's transitive too - you can pay/intimidate the people who enforce the no paying/intimidating rule.

You can structure the law such that, if you report a bribe that results in a conviction, the criminal is still forced to pay the person they attempted to bribe, similar to how Qui Tam works. This would do a lot to discourage attempts at bribing law enforcement and prosecutors, who would be best positioned to secure such a conviction.

I would never vote again if it wasn’t anonymous. Retaliation is real.

I would suggest that if you don’t have the courage of your convictions to stand by your vote in public, maybe you shouldn’t be voting in the first place

It's easy to minimize someone else's situation down to "courage".

Quite a few husbands believe they should have control over their wives' votes. I guess you'd say they should have the courage to leave them and wreck their children's lives and be ostracized by their family and community?

And it's not hard to imagine certain employers having a strong opinion on how you vote on specific measures. Of course they couldn't compel anyone to reveal their votes, but it could be made customary enough that refusing to would be enough of a signal. I guess you'd need the courage to quit and take a lower paying job?

An employer creating a hostile workplace should obviously create a tort and liability under any kind of reasonable anti-corruption law in the same way it does under anti-discrimination law.

As for what happens in marriages or other social settings, yes, wives can coerce their husbands, fathers can coerce their adult daughters, friends can coerce one another. If your counterpart is the kind of person who would threaten to blow up your relationship over how you vote, yes, I would suggest maybe that tells you something about who they are and whether or not you want them in your life. But if the relationship means that much to you, you can always go along to get along and let them tell you how to vote. I think that says something about how much you value your vote though. And at the societal level, I don’t think this would have a meaningful impact on governance

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