From: Ernest Prabhakar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>In my view, public disclosure of precinct totals should be construed as a potential violation of voter secrecy. If a high percentage of people in my precinct vote a particular way, one could draw a highly probable inference about how I voted based on the precinct totals. Politicians may show favoritism toward or bias against certain precincts based on their voting patterns, or may use the information for targeted political marketing campaigns.
Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 11:12:01 -0700
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... Is there any way other groups could get access to summaries (e..g, the pairwise matrix) or scrubbed subset of ballots, for research purposes.Certainly precinct totals should be made available. We haven't done the threat analysis to determine whether or not individual ballots should be made available.
Furthermore, public disclosure of ballots, even devoid of any voter or precinct identity information, could also be construed as a secrecy violation because the ballots could be used to determine correlations between different ballot issues. For example, if the election includes a ballot initiative for Electoral Reform, one could use the ballots to determine the political constituencies of Electoral Reform advocates. This kind of information might make some politicians less likely to support Electoral Reform.
Of course, the ballot information could be obtained by conventional polling methods (e.g., exit polling), but in this case the voters have the option of withholding or misrepresenting their views. From my perspective, the only kind of "research purpose" for which ballots can be legitimately used is to determine the election outcome. Ballots and precinct-level totals should only be available to election officials and auditors who are obligated to maintain such information in confidence.
Ken Johnson
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