Reply #1: A CRITICALLY IMPORTANT POINT to understand:

[Land Shark]

The Secret Ballot (while I'm NOT against it) GUARANTEES A RADICALLY NON-AUDITABLE SYSTEM OF ELECTIONS.

Why?

Because ballot secrecy REQUIRES that ballots can not be connected back to particular voters, because then you'd know who voted how. But if you can't connect back to SOURCE DOCUMENTS (in this case, people) you can not have a completely AUDITABLE SYSTEM.

With ballot secrecy, we are truly at the mercy of the quality of our checks and balances and the quality of our chain of custody.

With ballot secrecy, analogies to ATMs are at best shaky and at worst totally inapplicable because ATMs are all about account numbers and the ability to track back in a totally non-secret way (your financial info is secret only from OTHER CUSTOMERS or the public but not from your financial information; with the bank's employees your financial information is BY NO MEANS secret, and they've probably sent you a privacy notice in the mail recently that is more accurately described as a privacy WAIVER notice allowing them to sell your info to third parties unless you object)

Ballot secrecy makes elections unique and in a class of their own.

The original reason for ballot secrecy is to prevent voter intimidation and retalation, which was a regular part of american electoral tradition, and sometimes still is. It is still popular for that reason.

But we need to be real clear that the secrecy of the ballot exacts a great cost in terms of election vulnerability.

Think of it this way: in the old fashioned town hall, we could have a fair election by raising hands, moving to opposite sides of the hall, all of us could count. The only risks are intimidation, bribery and inability to make the meeting, but those risks create evidence and witnesses....

Now, how do we add BALLOT SECRECY to the town hall meeting so we don't know how our neighbors voted??? WE DO THIS BY PUTTING BLINDFOLDS ON ALL THE VOTERS, AND THEN RAISING OUR HANDS AND HAVING THE GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS COUNT PERHAPS WITH A FEW VOLUNTEERS HELPING.

Do you see the problems created by ballot secrecy????