What is Democracy? (53): Secret Ballot, or Public Vote?

The secret ballot has become so common in modern democracies that it’s hardly ever questioned. And yet, there are good reasons why a democratic vote should be public. So, let’s go over the pros and cons of the secret ballot, and see where that gets us.

Advantages of the secret ballot

• The desire to avoid voter intimidation or bribery is the obvious and most commonly cited justification of the secrecy of the ballot. If people in power know how an individual votes, then this individual may be pressured to vote in a certain way. And “people in power” should be understood in a broad sense, including employers, dominant husbands etc. This justification is based on certain key features of a democracy, namely equal influence, one-man-one-vote etc. The risk of coercion is present even in societies where the general level of coercion is low and democratic values are widely shared. And it’s often the least advantaged who will be coerced, because they have most to gain from changing their vote to please someone else, and most to lose from not doing so.
• The risk of pressure can also be present in other, more subtle forms. For example, it has been shown that people are afraid to publicly oppose authority figures. Tests have shown that when an authority figure speaks first, there’s less dissent afterwards. An open ballot can lead to forced conformity.

Disadvantages of the secret ballot

• Implicit in the doctrine of the secret ballot is the assumption that the electoral process is no more than the aggregation of individual preferences which have been fixed previously and independently of the electoral process. However, the voting process is, ideally, also formative of preferences, and not merely an arithmetic process based on fixed preferences. That means that people deliberate and discuss about the best way to vote, about the best candidates and policies. But that also means that people have to present their positions and preferences in public. Maybe the ultimate vote can still be secret, but the initial voting intention can’t be if we want democracy to be a lively debate. But if the voting intention can be public, why not the actual vote?
• An open ballot allows representatives to know exactly whom they are representing. One of the advantages of this knowledge is that it allows for some efficiency gains. Representatives know who has to be convinced. Those efficiency gains should improve the electoral process.
• When you vote in an election for representatives or in a referendum, this vote has real consequences. Taken together with the votes of your fellow citizens, your vote is likely to change the lives of a number of people, and sometimes change these lives dramatically. Moreover, those people are likely to be minorities, and hence relatively powerless. It’s therefore important that voters are accountable to their fellow citizens and that they explain and justify the reasons they have for voting in a certain way. This horizontal accountability is incompatible with the secret ballot.
• Why should we have secret ballots for voters and at the same time open votes in parliament, as is usually the case? After all, the justifications for a secret ballot for voters also apply to representatives. They also may be subject to pressure when it’s known how they vote. Maybe to a lesser extent than some parts of the electorate, since they tend to be wealthy and generally powerful, but still. Representatives are less numerous, and hence it’s easier and more effective to use pressure in order to manipulate a vote. Also, the public nature of representatives’ positions makes them vulnerable to specific kinds of pressure that can’t be applied to ordinary citizens (e.g. they may be blackmailed for indecent private behavior and thereby pressured to vote in a certain way). Of course, representative bodies are different from electorates, and therefore not entirely comparable. For example, it’s hard to see how a representative body can be accountable to the electorate when it votes in secret. Voters have to know what the individual representatives have accomplished, or not, so that they can “throw the bums out” at the next election if necessary. Also, this threat of non-reelection can pressure the representatives to act in ways desired by the electorate. So, pressure – at least some kind of pressure – is part and parcel of the representative process, whereas it’s incompatible with a popular vote. However, even if a vote by representatives isn’t entirely comparable to a vote by the people, it still is somewhat comparable, and people arguing for a secret ballot in a general election will have to explain why their arguments don’t also apply to votes in parliament.
• Open ballots, both in representative bodies and in general, force people to restrict themselves to preferences and arguments that they can justify to others. If you vote in a certain way, and are seen to be voting in a certain way, people will ask you why. And if you’re pressured to answer this question and to justify your vote (or voting intention), it’s a lot more difficult to be motivated, or to be seen to be motivated by self-interest only. Hence, the open ballot will make voters more sensitive to the general interest, which is a good thing. Also, this public justification tends to improve the quality of preferences, since people have to think about them, argue about them with others etc. That’s the logic of the marketplace of ideas.
• And, finally, open ballots make electoral fraud a lot more difficult, if not impossible.

A New York polling place

Obviously, not all of these advantages and disadvantages have the same importance, and they don’t make it instantly clear whether a secret or an open ballot should be preferred in principle. Much depends on the specific circumstances. For example, in a country with a lot of economic inequality and gender inequality, the case for a secret ballot for voters is relatively strong. In general, a mixed system is probably best. However, we don’t have such a mixed system at the moment. Most modern democracies strongly favor secret ballots, and seem to ignore the real problems resulting from such a system. I believe some more attention should be given to these problems and to possible solutions, which obviously doesn’t mean that we should go to the other extreme and deny people’s right to keep their opinions to themselves if they so wish. There can’t be a duty of free speech.

More about secrecy here and here. More about publicity here. More posts in this series are here.

Human Rights Maps (93): One Man, One Vote

Democracy – or the right to take part in the government, directly or through representatives who have been freely chosen in regular and honest elections that guarantee the equal right to choose - is a human right. In fact, these words have been taken almost literally from article 21 of  the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A more detailed defense of democracy as a human right is here.

The “equal right” part has often been summarized in the phrase “one man, one vote” (nowadays that includes women, fortunately). Democracy tries to give everyone equal political influence and to give equal consideration and protection to everybody’s interests, and it does so first of all by giving everybody equal voting rights. However, “one man, one vote” isn’t enough to give everyone equal political influence and to ensure that everyone’s interests are taken into account. The way that people use their vote can be influenced through propaganda, unfair media attention, unequal education, excessive use of money in campaigning etc. That is why democracies don’t stop at equal and universal voting rights, but also try to improve education and public discourse and impose limits on unequal participation in political campaigning (e.g. campaign financing limits, fair and balanced media coverage etc.).

If some people are excluded from the vote, or if other people have a disproportionate influence on the way people vote, then some of us have more political influence than others, and hence more power to protect our interests. Those who believe in democracy accept that certain people always more power than others to advance their interests, because political talents and interest differ, but the purpose of democracy is to equalize influence as much as possible. That is why nobody has more than one vote (it used to be different in the early stages of democracy) and nobody’s excluded from the suffrage (if you kindly forget about some categories of people; see here and here). And it’s also the reason why asymmetrical influence on the way people use the vote is discouraged. If all votes aren’t equal, and everybody doesn’t have the same rights and means to participate in and influence political decisions, then it’s difficult to claim that the people govern.

One of the mechanisms that change the weight of a vote that I haven’t mentioned yet is one that is build into the election systems of some countries. A notable example is the U.S. Senate.

I will not repeat how the U.S. Senate deviates from the principle of “one man, one vote” (see here if you want, or here). Suffice it to say that each U.S state is represented by two senators, regardless of population. In an interesting but utopian effort, Neil Freeman has kindly altered the map of the U.S. so that all states contain a more or less equal population, and “one man, one vote” is restored:

(source, click to enlarge)

Easier would be to change the composition of the US Senate methinks, or to just abolish it.

And it’s not just the U.S. Senate that fails to respect the “one man one vote” rule. The Presidential election in the U.S. is in fact an indirect election: voters elect members of the electoral college. These members are so-called electors who have pledged to a presidential candidate. These electors then elect the President. Presidential candidates have to have a majority in the electoral college – more than half of the 538 electors. Because states can send a number of electors to the college that doesn’t match the population size of states – some states can send more per capita electors than other states – presidential candidates can get a majority in the college without having a majority among voters. The U.S. Constitution specifies the number of electors to which each state is entitled. Electoral votes are allocated to the states each decade to reflect population shifts, but every state is guaranteed three electoral votes before allocation kicks in.

Proponents of the college argue that the system protects the rights of smaller states. Numerous constitutional amendments have been introduced, unsuccessfully, in Congress seeking to alter the Electoral College or replace it with a direct popular vote.

(source)

In Wyoming, there are 143,000 people for each of its three electoral votes. The states with the weakest votes are New York, Florida, and California. These states each have around 500,000 people for each electoral vote. In other words, one Wyoming voter has roughly the same vote power as four New York voters. (source)

More human rights maps here.

Human Rights Maps (71): Voting Rights for Felons in the U.S.

Currently, 2.6 million ex-cons are barred from voting because of US felony disenfranchisement laws. This is on top of the 3.2 million disenfranchised still in prison.

(source)

A slightly different version:

(source, click on the image to enlarge)

And yet another version:

Taking away someone’s human rights can only be done for a good reason, for example if this is necessary in order to protect other people’s rights. So we can imprison people and take away their freedom of movement if there is no other way to protect the security and property of other people. However, I always failed to understand the benefits of taking away prisoners’ right to vote. And completely incomprehensible is the permanent disenfranchisement after a felony conviction. The reason can’t be because they’re not worthy to vote. I can think of many other people who could be considered not worthy to vote. If we go down that road, we might as well abolish democracy altogether and hand over power to the intellectual and virtuous elite, if such a thing exists.

Perhaps the reason has something to do with crime prevention. The argument could be that if we allow criminals to shape the legislative system we’ll end up with a system that favors crime. However, Patrick Appel has some evidence that indicates that disenfranchisement is actually a counterproductive crime control measure:

According to a 2004 study, former prisoners who vote are half as likely to reoffend. If suffrage constitutes even a small nudge toward the straight and narrow, why shouldn’t we grant prisoners the right to vote? As things now stand, criminal-voting laws vary widely by state: in some, a first-time drug offender will be denied the right to vote for life; in others, murderers can vote while behind bars. But overall, America’s position on voting rights, particularly with regard to former criminals, is the most punitive of any developed nation. … Crime costs this country an estimated $1.4 trillion annually. Unless disenfranchisement helps reduce that number — and the evidence suggests that it does the opposite — then denying prisoners the vote in order to minutely heighten the virtue of the voting pool is a bad trade.

A better argument in favor of disenfranchisement is that convicted felons don’t deserve to help shape the society they live in, because by their actions they have proven to reject that society. Hence society has the right to reject them, even after they have paid for their crimes. Disenfranchisement is then a kind of “pure punishment”, a punishment that is imposed for its own sake, merely because people deserve it and not because of some possible positive consequences it might produce (like capital punishment in the minds of those proponents who have – rightly – given up on the deterrent argument). However, one can argue that rejecting people from society – and that’s what you do when you take away their voting rights – is a rather risky course of action. Rejected people are dangerous people. If a criminal gets the message that society doesn’t care about him anymore, why would he care about society and about what he does to it?

There’s an interesting article on the same subject here. The result of these restrictions is that over 5 million Americans are prohibited from participating in the democratic process. Because African Americans are disproportionately likely to be in prison, they are particularly affected: 7.7% of the total African-American population is denied the vote.

(source)

Some prison statistics are here. More human rights maps here. Some explanations about why voting rights are human rights are here.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (27): Equal Political Rights for Women

(source)

More on equal voting rights for women here. And here is something on democracy as a human right. More iconic images of human rights violations are here.

What is Democracy? (37): One Man, One Vote

(art by Ted Ellis, source)

Or better, one person, one vote. It’s not until relatively recently that women and minorities have been given the vote, even in the most advanced democracies in the world. Here and here are posts on the importance of equality for democracy.

In most modern democracies, all adults have 1 vote. No large groups are excluded from voting, and no one has more votes than anyone else. (In the early days of many democracies, some people had a larger number of votes; this was called plural voting).

However, it’s not because all people have one vote, that all votes have the same weight and that all people have an equal weight in the aggregate outcome of the vote. They only have in democracies that use proportional representation. PR results in a political spectrum in parliament that roughly coincides with the spectrum of the voters. No part of the electorate is over- or under-represented.

Democracies which do not use PR often use district systems (e.g. the U.S. and the U.K.). This is also called the “first-past-the-post” system – whoever has most votes in a district (not necessarily the majority of votes) gets the seat in parliament reserved for this district and becomes the only representative for the district (“winner takes all”). In some cases, this electoral system gives power to a relative majority and therefore, not necessarily an absolute majority. A party that has a few more votes than all other parties in a majority of districts, will have a majority of seats in parliament, but perhaps a minority of the votes. As this example indicates, a district system can result in the rule of a minority. An important minority or maybe, even a majority may not be represented at all. Political equality and majority rule, the basic values of a democracy, are affected. There is no longer a perfect match between the views of the people and the views present in parliament.

In such a system, the one-man-one-vote principle can be further harmed If the districts are not equal in proportion in terms of population. If both a small group of people and a large group of people have one representative, then we can hardly claim to have political equality, regardless of the possible problems created by the winner-takes-all rule. In some countries, rich minorities have often been given small districts, which favored them politically and offered them a very large and disproportional share of the seats in parliament. This is called gerrymandering.

For these and other reasons, the type of democracy instituted in the U.S. deviates, in part, from the principle of one-man-one-vote (a reason for some to call it a republic rather than a democracy, although the difference between these two concepts is spurious, see here). Whereas each member of the House of Representatives represents more or less the same number of voters (even though the system is based on voting districts), the Senate seats are not allocated according to population. Each state, large and small, gets two seats. Wyoming, with barely half a million citizens, has exactly the same political influence in the Senate as California (37m citizens). If you view U.S. states as large districts, you could say that the U.S. Senate has institutionalized the bias that gerrymandering can create in district systems.

This wouldn’t be so bad if the U.S. Senate, the Second Chamber in the U.S. parliament, didn’t have so much political power. It’s powers, defined in the Constitution, include

• consenting to treaties as a precondition to their ratification
• approval of both chambers is necessary for the passage of legislation.

Even a minority of Senators can block legislation. The filibuster is a tactic used to defeat bills and motions by prolonging debate indefinitely. As it takes 60 votes out of a total of 100 Senators to stop a filibuster, a minority can block everything if it wants. So again, a further restriction of the democratic principle of one-man-one-vote. The Economist has calculated that if the least populous states ganged together, senators representing 11% of the population could thwart the will of the remaining 89%. Speaking of tyranny of the majority … The filibuster has often been used for very conservative and ill-intended purposes such as the preservation of Jim Crow laws and wasteful farm subsidies.

(source)

The longest filibuster speech in the history of the Senate was delivered by Strom Thurmond, who spoke for over 24 hours in an unsuccessful attempt to block the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

Strom Thurmond

(source)

It can of course be used for more positive purposes as well. It can slow down over-anxious House representatives and hence improve the quality of legislation. The division of the legislative power into two parts, an Upper House and a Lower House or a House of Representatives and a Senate, is typical of a democracy and makes it possible to correct mistakes made in one House. One House can slow down or stop another House when some decisions are too risky or are taken without the necessary reflection or discussions. This system

doubles the security to the people by requiring the concurrence of two distinct bodies in schemes of usurpation or perfidy, where the ambition or corruption of one would otherwise be sufficient. James Madison in the Federalist Papers.

James Madison

(source)

If we expect two houses or chambers to control and correct each other, then the participants of both must be selected in different ways. But it seems that this can still be done with a higher degree of respect for the principle of one-man-one-vote.

The reasoning behind this deviation from the one-man-one-vote system in the U.S. was to ensure equal representation of each state in the Senate, so that populous states can’t take measures that harm the fundamental interests of small states and therefore can’t violate the federalist philosophy of the U.S. It was supposed to be a counterweight against the “people’s house” (the House of Representatives) that would be sensitive to public opinion. Trust in public opinion has never been very high (which I argue is a self-fulfilling prophecy). But rather than protect the U.S. from the tyranny of public opinion, one has delivered it to the tyranny of the minority. Hardly democratic at all.