What Americans lost when we abandoned secret ballots | Eastern North Carolina Now

Make no mistake, ballot secrecy is incompatible with secure mail-in balloting. At the polls, we each go into a little booth and make our choices in private. By contrast, no one knows where a mail-in ballot was filled out, or if a party or union activist hovered over the voter or even filled in the circles. Nobody knows what inducements, whether cash or threats, were offered to ensure that the person voted “correctly.” And if the ballot was “harvested”—turned in to the vote-counters by activists instead of by voters themselves—our suspicions deepen.

To verify that a mail-in-voter is entitled to cast a ballot and has done so only once, the vote counters who are legally entitled to open the envelope need to know who signed the outside. True, one can physically separate verification of voters’ identity by sending each voter two envelopes—an outer one for the person to sign and an inner one in which the voter places the filled-out ballot. In the vote-counting room, one set of workers can verify the voter’s identity at one table, destroy the outer envelopes, and give the inner envelopes containing the ballot to another set of workers, who then open those inner envelopes and tabulate the votes. As long as everybody follows these rules, ballot secrecy is preserved, even with mail-in balloting.

Any of those vote-counting workers or party officials may discover how you voted and give that information to those who will use it against you at work or at school, possibly with the help of the highly partisan staff at big tech companies like Google and Facebook. If you think nothing like that could happen—if you think that the laws that forbid that kind of thing are generally enforced—remember that we have seen people harmed by illegal or unethical releases of public records, with the victims generally on the political side of Jack Ryan or Joe the Plumber, and the perpetrators suffering no criminal or civil penalty.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/14/what-americans-lost-when-we-abandoned-the-secret-ballot/

I did the early voting in 2020.  I was shocked when they put a number on my ballot.  I asked what that was for and was told if you die or are convicted of a felony before election day we can pull your ballot.  So my ballot was not secret, it could be identified as to who cast the ballot.  I was very uncomfortable with that.  All I could think how if the wrong person gets into office how that could be used against people.  In the future I will stick with voting election day.