They can tell who votes. Your entire premise is based on a belief that votes are anonymous. They aren’t. They are pretected from the public. If you have ever worked in election, which I have, you would know that. You have to cross reference if someone voted twice, are alive, or even registered in the county they voted in. There are computers that verify electronic bullets and there are batch audits. No one is ever allowed to be alone even with one ballet. Everything is done in a team. If your partner calls in sick, you’re the third wheel to another team.
Just because the public doesn’t know doesn’t mean the government doesn’t know.
Oh man are you confused. For everyone else this person doesnt know how voting works.
Voting in the states is 100% anonymous across the board. The data trail stops after a person is signed in at the polls. There is zero information on a ballot to identify you.
You do know I worked in an election? For everyone else this person is grandstanding!
🤦 no you havent or your state has some weird laws. which state are you need lets go look at their ballot. this is easily disproved.
I am not giving you personal information. Especially since you seem like some unhinged troll. I worked in an election. It’s easily proven. How else would they know that 15 Bob Smiths didn’t vote in every adjacent county. And for every issue? How do you think they verify if they are alive? Just magic and pixie dust?
That’s basically what was being said and it’s not functionally different because the vast majority of the public does not work in elections or their verification. In essence if 99% of the population does not have access to data or cannot interpret said data, trust is needed.
I read certain phrases from what they wrote and it infers that people do not know who voted for who or what. That just isn’t the mechanism. It’s done by computers. It has to be tabulated for a multitude of reasons. It’s not anonymous to the mechanism. It is anonymous to the public. Which is not what the original statement. It was that the trust is built from no one at all ever knowing or being to tell.
First, I’m writing about a person who’s watching and doesn’t know if they can trust the system. My point is that there’s no alternative to trust in the system, the system is built on trust.
Second, if you’re inside the system, if you’re an election worker or a government authority, you can tell who voted. But, you can’t tell who that voter cast their votes for – at least in a functional democracy.
The authorities can, and should, have all kinds of checks and balances to make sure that all the votes are being handled safely and counted correctly. But, if the public doesn’t trust the authorities, there’s nothing that the authorities can realistically do to convince the public that everything is above board. You can’t “prove” that the system isn’t rigged.
Oh you can tell. But it’s not going to be easy to report it without getting caught. Part of the process is auditing. We would take certain stacks that had incomplete marks and try and figure out who or what they meant. But it’s just hi ho hum work because it’s a madhouse. Remembering that Betty Smith voted for Prop 17 by the end of the day would be really difficult without being very obvious that was who you were looking for.
Then there are verifications on who voted at all that were registered to the right polls. All their answers are on their ballots. Security is what keeps it secret and a precise way of dealing with it. In a big room with many eyes. Kind of like a casino’s money vault.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Votes are anonymous. You can tell who voted, but not what they voted for. It’s crucial for the fairness of elections that a vote cannot be definitively connected to the individual who cast it; if you could, you could coerce or retaliate.
And all of the things you mention are the trust OP is talking about. You were a trusted person in that situation. The process increases and validates trust.