ChatterBank3 mins ago
Voting in anonymity ?
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 ?
Answers
No best answer has yet been selected by Cristo. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.
For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.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.
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.
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