Should we ditch the Australian 'secret ballot'.

The difference is that the people cannot be held responsible by other people for their votes. Government officials have to be.

 

Of course you know the answer to this. For example, people who supported proposition 8 (the anti-gay marriage amendment) in California were ostracized and punished by others. That is the only reason you could want a public ballot. So that you could have the ability to punish people who vote for people you don't like. This is a different world than before the secret ballot was adopted.

 

No, but with proper justification, the states or the feds can change things. As the OP said, the secret ballot didn't exist for almost the first 100 years of our great American experiment. I am totally for the secret ballot, but that doesn't mean I have a right to it. My state constitution guarantees me the right to a secret ballot (doesn't give it to me, but guarantees it).

 

I don't want accountability for your vote, and I would bet most people disagree with you. I don't care who you vote for, but I don't want you to have the ability to harass me for my views. (and no, I didn't vote for Trump, it just scares me that a group of hardcore political terrorists could get a hold of a list of the voters (with their addresses) so that they could terrorize people who voted for the other guy.

 

Amd the armed citizens have the right to revolt when the feds or the states violate their rights

 

At least you're being honest that the only reason you want to get rid of the secret ballot is so you can hunt down people who voted in a way you don't approve of.

 

It is in the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

Article 21.3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, "The will of the people...shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which...shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures."[23]

 

Well, because of guys like him, I'm glad my state has language in it's constitution guaranteeing a secret ballot.

 

The only reason to want to know voting details of individuals is to persecute them based on who they vote for.

 

An open ballot causes citizens great harm, harassing phone calls, vandalism on ones property , violence one one self..


How do I know this as fact? American unions

 

I read this and then had to read it again. Two things came to mind right away:

1) Was this literally just an attempt to get President Trump and Nazi Germany (Adolph Hitler) in a post together?
2) It's none of your business who I vote for, what my motives are or what my reasons are.

Are we really trying to go back to the early 1930's and all the way back to the late 1800's? Why don't we just make people wear a colored armband signifying how they voted for?

I would say this is not only only dangerous but reckless as well. President Trump was elected by the Electoral College despite the fact that Trump voters were called out continually, harassed and attacked at events. It sounds like the OP here is angry over the fact that Trump won and he wants to single out voters for "retribution".

Please tell me I am wrong.

I don't want to know who my neighbors voted for. Nor my friends unless it comes up in a decent conversation, the people who make my food, wash my car., sell me groceries, etc, etc. Privacy here is not just respecting people's privacy but politically, we don't need to know who voted for who and when. This sounds outright dangerous. Dangerous and reckless.

Let me tell you a story. Back in college I was in NROTC. I sat in a classroom my sophomore year and the professor asked a single question. "Who here is in the military? Stand up." 2 gentlemen stood up but I found the question a little odd and decided it was none of his business. I stayed seated. The professor looked at both of the students and told them straight away, "You are baby killers and you are not wanted here. Good luck passing my class." I was shocked at the treatment of students by this professor and shocked that he would even say such things. The two students dropped the class but I stayed silent, got through the semester with a decent grade and made sure I was never in that professors class again. This wasn't the only example I encountered from vindictive people who held power over others and used it to punish them.

If you don't think privacy is important and you don't think people will go out of their way to ruin your life because you think differently then they do or because you sit on the opposite side of the aisle, I can tell you unequivocally, you are wrong. I have seen it first hand.

I think Trump won for the very opposite reason you state in your argument above. Trump won because he could return the country back to the center and away from those who would subject people to Soviet or Nazi style tyranny. He is a businessman with no political experience and an outsider. You may not like him and you may want him impeached but at least be honest for the reasons why. It better not be because you equate him with Hitler.

 

the entire thread is based upon...

umm...

well...

nothing...

other than...

...

 

OK, but then I read this at the bottom of your post:

"Obama never listened to anyone, always thought he was smarter than every expert in the room and treated every meeting as an opportunity to lecture everyone else. This led to real world disasters like Syria and the rise of ISIS, but the real world doesn’t matter to the elites – for them it’s all about style and tone, not substance and results." - British prime minister, David Cameron.

Hardly impartial of Cameron....

For a start, Obama did listen to Summers and other so called economic experts, when he (Obama) should have locked up at least a dozen banksters in 2010.

 

Though untested to my knowledge, because no court in any legitimate court system in a just state would rule in favor of public ballots in the citizenry, were the right to private ballot ever tested, Griswold v Connecticut would assuredly be controlling law. It grounds the privacy right by tying together several other Constitutional rights. Don't like that OP? You'll need to get rid of the SCOTUS case that protects birth control, abortion, same sex marriage and homosexual relations generally to change that.

Get em on a list, then get em up against the wall. No thanks. If I hadn't seen this attitude in LW so many times over the years, I'd not believe a thread like this could even exist from a United States citizen.

But yeah, it's Griswold, it would be applied (it couldn't -not- be applied to private ballots), and because of the nature of our legal system that relies on interpretive jurisprudence considered part and parcel of the Constitution, while Griswold is the law, there -is- very much a Constitutional right to vote via private ballot. It lies in penumbra and not explicit text, but as long as Griswold says it's there, it's there. A large paper or small book could be written on subsequent application, expansion and more specific cases, but for here, that's enough to answer the silly "questions" OP was yammering about on and on.