Voting in anonymity ?

[Cristo]

I have been voting for a lot of years and only yesterday did i realise that my vote is not done anonymously.

my polling card has a number on it , passed to another clerk , recorded on the counterfoil of the numbered ballot paper. So any interested party knows how i have voted. Take the previous discussion on the BNP, I'm sure all 5000 voters are now in a little file somewhere for future reference.

Can anyone tell me I'm wrong ?

[flaming]

That's another reason to be against postal voting.  Surely it's easy for people 'at the other end' to access the records unseen by others?  In the polling station you fold your ballot paper after voting and place it in the locked ballot box.  I agree if certain people wanted to see what you'd put they could break open the ballot box and scrabble amonst all the papers, but they'd have to wait until the polls close.....oh the 'ifs'  go on.  There are observers in the room, there are often MPs supporters floating about (there was someone of the sort outside my polling station when I went), there are the Party supporter-number takers  -  but you don't have to give your voting number to them...  If your number was not punched on the ballot paper, people could vote any number of times.  There are heavy penalties for anyone who interferes with those ballot boxes and everything has to be under the eyes of others at all times.  Perhaps there is someone reading this who could confirm what happens between Polling Stations and Town Halls?  What I was surprised about at my new Polling Station (I have moved) was the proximity of the clerks' table to the voting counters, not actual shielded-from-them booths like I remember from my past Polling Station.  (I've been banging on to all and sundry about my dismay about postal voting!)

[bernardo]

It is only possible to find out how an individual voter voted if you match up the serial numbers on the ballot paper and the counterfoil.  This is only possible by trawling through thousands of ballot papers tediously.  This is only possible if it is specifically ordered to be done by an election court.  This would only be done if it was necessary to trace a vote which has been cast fraudulently so that it can be replaced by a valid vote form the correct person.

[jenstar]

Actually, at the end of the count, the votes for any given candidate will all be bundled together, and of course the numbers are assigned to a particular polling station in the first instance - so far from "trawling" through as bernardo suggests, it would actually be a fairly trivial matter to trace all votes for a certain party or candidate.

[acw]

Trivial, but illegal.  The number is there in case there needs to be an investigation into fraud.  However no-one else is allowed to match up the numbers for any other reason. 

[bernardo]

Actually, at the end of the count, the votes for any given candidate will all be bundled together, and of course the numbers are assigned to a particular polling station in the first instance - so far from "trawling" through as bernardo suggests, it would actually be a fairly trivial matter to trace all votes for a certain party or candidate.

But they would still have to trawl through thousands of votes anyway, to find the ballot paper with the serial number which matches up with the counterfoil which was used by the voter whose vote you are supposedly trying to find.  It would only be "trivial" to find it if you have already gone through the tedious process of sorting out the thousands of ballot papers in order of their serial numbers in the first place.  There have been various myths and conspiracy theories of this being done to identify Communist or Fascist voters, but no proper evidence of this happening improperly has ever been found.

[Pinotage]

I think you are confusing secret with anonymous. Your vote is done in secret; you can go in the booth and no-one knows who you are voting for. You can't be pressurised by others as you could when voting meant standing in a cowd and putting your hand up.

Sure there is a way of crosschecking individual voters with their ballot should it be necessary, this stops the practise that sometimes happens in some countries with additional voting slips being stuffed in boxes.