Secret Ballot Watch

As a former Montana secretary of state, Bob Brown understands the history and importance of the secret ballot.

In a recent essay for the Missoulian, Brown said the secret ballot in America started during Reconstruction as a way to protect former slaves from “brutal harassment” at the polls while exercising their new right to vote. By the turn of the century, the practice had spread to both Northern and Southern states.

The secret ballot’s ability to protect privacy was a reason why Brown refused to support mail-in ballots in Big Sky Country while in office. It is also why he is against the Employee Free Choice Act now. Brown explained his stance here: 

“While mindful of the justifications for mail-only elections, I could never bring myself to support them. A domineering parent or spouse might vote for a whole family. Political special interest groups or even religious organizations might want to help you mark your ballot if all voters receive them in the mail, and the option of the safe haven of the voting booth is taken away.

“Now we see an additional threat to our tradition of the secret ballot which for over a century has protected our most vulnerable voters from coercion. Under the guise of the ‘Employee Free Choice Act,’ American workers could be denied the right to the secret ballot in deciding whether to unionize their work places. If the proposed act now before Congress becomes law, once a majority of the employees sign up, a work place could be organized. There can be no effective safeguard to assure that employees would not be pressured into signing the union card.

“Both labor and entrepreneurial leadership are necessary to make a profit. No enterprise can succeed without both. …

“But a union should be able to make its case solidly enough that a worker will vote to organize without an organizer having to look over his shoulder. With a secret ballot, workers can freely vote their own honestly held beliefs. Without it they cannot. There is no place or justification anywhere in our system of free elections for citizens to lose their right to vote as they believe.”

Brown, “Secret ballots mean free elections,” Missoulian (Montana), 09.08.09

As Brown correctly notes, the history of the secret ballot has been a successful one. But the Employee Free Choice Act wants to toss aside this practice at the expense of a worker’s privacy. Add EFCA’s ability to harm an already weakened economy, and it’s clear that the act should go down in the history books not as an attempt to help workers, but as a threat to their privacy and livelihoods.

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