Secret Ballot Watch

They tried mail-in ballots and even considered voting by Internet. But in the end, residents of a small Canadian city wanted to go back to the best method of voting: secret ballot.

City elders in Clarington, Ontario, voted to restore the secret-ballot method for the 2010 local elections after hearing from a number of residents concerned about the “unsupervised” nature of both mail-in and online voting. Here’s what some residents told the local paper about those voting methods:  

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“‘Any method of remote voting is flawed,’ said Bowmanville resident Louis Bertrand. ‘Mail and phone have problems and the Internet is worse.’ 

Remote versions allow for the possibility of ‘loss of confidentiality,’ he said. They allow for the ‘potential for coercion, vote selling or voter solicitation by a candidate.’ … 

“‘It's an intractable problem that you have to be able to trust the process and also be able to say that this person is the person who actually cast the vote and nobody was standing over the (voter's) shoulder, coercing the vote,’ he said. And in homes where several voters share a computer, ‘it's very difficult to have a secret ballot.’ 

“The mail-in version, said local resident Brian Mountford, is the ‘most wide open to manipulations.’” 

Stone, “Clarington to move back to traditional voting methods,” Clarington This Week, 10.28.09 

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It’s a lesson supporters of the so-called Employee Free Choice Act have stubbornly refused to learn. At first, their bill would have set aside the secret ballot and replaced it with a public sign-up process in organizing elections – leaving workers open to the intimidation that Clarington residents feared.  

Then, after the American people totally rejected EFCA’s “card check” voting method, they floated the mail-in ballot as an alternative. As many Clarington residents noted, using the mail can also lead to intimidation and even fraud.  

In the end, there’s really no other method of voting – for a union or a government – that people like more than the secret ballot. Other Canadians besides those in Clarington prefer it. New Zealanders like it, too. And so do people in the United States, which is just another reason why EFCA must be scrapped for good.

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