{"id":451092,"date":"2020-09-09T16:18:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-09T20:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=451092"},"modified":"2020-09-14T16:19:04","modified_gmt":"2020-09-14T20:19:04","slug":"voting-by-mail-limits-the-spread-of-covid-19-but-is-the-ballot-really-secret","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/voting-by-mail-limits-the-spread-of-covid-19-but-is-the-ballot-really-secret\/","title":{"rendered":"Voting by mail limits the spread of COVID-19. But is the ballot really secret?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not everyone who votes at home can do so in complete privacy, warn James Johnson<\/a>, political science professor at the Ä¢¹½´«Ã½<\/a>, and Susan Orr<\/a>, associate professor of political science at the College of Brockport<\/a>, State University of New York.<\/p>\n

In a guest essay for The Conversation<\/a> that also appeared in Salon<\/a>, the Chicago Tribune<\/a>, and the Houston Chronicle<\/a>, the husband-wife team write that while voting by mail this November would allow tens of millions of people to participate safely in the election despite the pandemic\u2014it carries its own risk to the integrity of the voting. <\/p>\n

While voting by mail is \u201cwidely available, popular, well-protected against fraud and doesn’t provide either political party with any special advantage,\u201d it doesn’t address outside forces that may influence voters at the moment of decision making, say the coauthors of the forthcoming book Should Secret Voting Be Mandatory?<\/a> (Polity, November 2020).<\/p>\n

\u201cThe voter marks the ballot outside the supervision of election monitors\u2014often at home,\u201d Orr and Johnson write. \u201cIt’s possible to do so in secret. But secrecy is no longer guaranteed, and for some it may actually be impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Johnson\u2019s current research runs the gamut from pragmatist political thought and democratic theory, to the philosophy of social science and cultural theories of politics. He is the coauthor of The Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism<\/a> (Princeton University Press, 2011). Orr\u2019s primary research focuses on the politics of organized labor in the US.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While voting by mail would allow tens of millions of people to participate safely in this fall’s election, it carries its own risk to the integrity of the voting, say the authors of a forthcoming book on secret balloting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":942,"featured_media":451162,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29212],"tags":[21462],"class_list":["post-451092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-voices-opinion","tag-department-of-political-science"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nVoting by mail limits the spread of COVID-19. 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