Secret ballot

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  (Redirected from Secret Ballot)
Jump to: navigation, search
For 2001 Iranian film, see Secret Ballot (film).

The secret ballot is a voting method in which a voter's choices in an election or a referendum are anonymous, forestalling attempts to influence the voter by intimidation or bribery. The system is one means of achieving the goal of political privacy. Secret ballots may increase the amount of vote buying where it is still legal by paying lukewarm supporters to turn out and paying lukewarm opponents to stay home, and therefore may reduce the costs of buying an election.[1]

Secret ballots are suitable for many different voting systems. The most basic form may be blank pieces of paper, upon which each voter writes only his or her choice. Without revealing their votes to anyone, the electors place the ballots into a sealed box, which is emptied later for counting.



In ancient Greece, secret ballots were used in several situations,[2] like ostracism, and also to remain hidden from people seeking favors.




Article 31 of the French Constitution of 1795[4] states that "All elections are to be held by secret ballot". The same goes with the constitution of 1848:[5] voters could hand-write the name of their preferred candidate on their ballot at home (the only condition was to write on a white paper[6]) or receive one in a distribution in the street.[7] The ballot is folded in order to prevent other people from reading its content.[citation needed]


According to the official web site of the Assemblee nationale (the lower house of the French parliament), the voting booth was permanently adopted only in 1913.[9]

United Kingdom[edit]


The demand for a secret ballot was one of the six points of Chartism.[10] The British parliament of the time refused to even consider the Chartist demands but it is notable that Lord Macaulay, in his speech of 1842, while rejecting Chartism's six points as a whole, admitted that the secret ballot was one of the two points he could support.


The secret ballot was eventually extended generally in the Ballot Act 1872, substantially reducing the cost of campaigning, and was first used on 15 August 1872 to re-elect Hugh Childers as MP for Pontefract in a ministerial by-election following his appointment as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. The original ballot box, sealed in wax with a liquorice stamp, is held at Pontefract museum.[11] The use of numbered ballots makes it theoretically possible, given access to the relevant documents, to identify who has voted for whom, although it has never been done since the secret ballot was introduced.[citation needed]


Chartist ideas influenced the miners of Eureka Stockade in 1854 in Victoria where they adopted all of Chartism's six points including the secret ballot. Secret balloting appears to have been first implemented in the former Australian colony (now a state) of Tasmania on February 7, 1856. Until the original Tasmanian Electoral Act of 1856 was 're-discovered' recently, credit for the first implementation of the secret ballot often went to the colonies of Victoria and South Australia.[12] Victoria enacted legislation for secret ballots on March 19, 1856, and South Australian Electoral Commissioner William Boothby generally gets credit for creating the system finally enacted into law in South Australia on April 2 of that same year (a fortnight later).

United States[edit]



  1. an official ballot being printed at public expense,
  3. being distributed only at the polling place and
  4. being marked in secret.




Disabled people[edit]




Secrecy vs. reliability[edit]


This measure is thought to be justified as a security arrangement so that if there was an allegation of fraud, false ballot papers could be identified. The process of matching ballot papers to voters is permissible only if an Election Court requires it, and that is very unlikely; in fact the Election Court has never made such an order since the secret ballot was introduced in 1872. The legal authority for this system is set out in the Parliamentary Elections Rules in Schedule 1 of the Representation of the People Act 1983.[18]


Chronology of introduction[edit]

Date Country Notes
1795 (August 22) France
1849 Netherlands
1853 Colombia
1861 Italy
1861 Ecuador
1870 New Zealand
1872 United Kingdom Ballot Act 1872
1872 Switzerland
1874 Canada
1877 Belgium
1885 Norway
1900[20] Japan
1901 Denmark In connection with The Shift of Government (Danish: Systemskiftet)[21]
1906 Russia
1907 Austria
1907 Finland
1912 Argentina
1918 Poland
1918 Uruguay
1919 Romania
1925 Costa Rica
1931 Peru
1932 Brazil
1946 Venezuela
1947 Hungary
1950 Turkey
1950 El Salvador

See also[edit]


  1. ^ Morgan, Felix; Várdy (November 9, 2010). ﻿Negative Vote Buying and the Secret Ballot﻿ (IMF working papers series). University of California, Berkeley: International Monetary Fund. doi:10.2139/ssrn.1706490. Retrieved September 22, 2012.
  8. ^ Karl Marx The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon : For the bourgeois and the shopkeeper had learned that in one of his decrees of December 2 Bonaparte had abolished the secret ballot and had ordered them to put a “yes” or “no” after their names on the official registers. The resistance of December 4 intimidated Bonaparte. During the night he had placards posted on all the street corners of Paris announcing the restoration of the secret ballot. Full text (chapter VII)
  9. ^ Assemblée nationale : La République et le suffrage universel
  10. ^ In the words of the petition that was published in 1838:
  11. ^ Pontefract's secret ballot box, 1872.
  12. ^ Terry Newman, Tasmania and the Secret Ballot PDF (144 KiB) (2003), 49(1) Aust J Pol & Hist 93, accessed February 27, 2006
  20. ^

External links[edit]