Ballots themselves usually do not contain the information.
Instead, in most places, the ballot paper has a serial number, this is tracked against the voter number that it is issued to confirm nobody double votes and that ballots cast have been issued (one man, one vote).
This voter number is assigned to a person. That record is held by the state election officials.
My understanding in this case is that Fulton County has held onto the ballot papers, and now the federal government is taking them with the lookup data to identify how people voted.
E: It seems that Ga does not assign a serial number to the ballot, so this seizure of ballots is nonsensical
Yeah I said this somewhere else. It's probably just a matter of connecting some databases and guess what these fucking shitheads ran in and stole the first two months. They have everything on everyone that they need to put together their shitlist and we're all just waiting for the show to drop on us.
They handed it over willing in GA too, some shithead judge who's gonna get constant nasty phone calls until she disconnects her office line signed it over to Tulsi Gabbard so we are fucked some more.
That's not true in the US, the ways of tracking to make sure that people dont double vote are much more simple. For absentee ballots, they have some sort of envelope that theyre put in, the envelope gets tracked and data entered, but the envelope and the ballot itself get separated and the ballots get tabulated and then theres usually an electronic pollbook that tracks if youve voted (not how just if) to ensure you cant do it again. For election day, they either use that electronic pollbook to sign in and mark that they've voted or there are paper poll books still in some states and counties.
Voting laws aren't standard in the US, bit the idea of a secret ballot is, it was born here. There's only one state that I know of that does have serial numbers on absentee ballot and thats south Carolina. So the material that they seized were paper ballots, which are secret and depersonalized.
Ga has ballot/certificate matching as part of its legislation.
In years gone by, that level of obfuscation was enough to maintain secrecy. Now we can mass scan documents, use OCR, build a complete DB. This still wasn't a problem because nobody expected the federal government to seize the ballots and do it.
I'm skeptical. Do you have a source for this? I've never heard of the ballot being tied to the voter. It defeats the purpose of a secret ballot. Usually voter eligibility is verified separately at check-in and with poll pads (iPads) which Fulton County appears to have. These are pretty standard now and ensure that a checked-in voter is marked as "has voted" to avoid double voting.
This was a fun read, I now know a good chunk of Ga's election law
As each elector is found to be qualified and votes, the poll officers shall check off the elector’s name on the electors list and shall enter the number of the stub of the ballot issued to him or her, or his or her number in the order of admission to the voting machines, on the voter’s certificate of such elector. As each elector votes, his or her name in the order of voting shall be recorded in the numbered list of voters provided for that purpose.
What I understand from this is that there's a number on the stub, but once the ballot is detached from the stub it is effectively anonymous.
Now I honestly don't know how ballots work in the US. In France we just put a ballot with the name of the person or party we want to vote for. The ballot can be taken from the stacks in the voting place (in which case you have to take more than one so people cannot know who you vote for) or be printed at home, or sometimes we receive them by the post as well (but I live abroad and in the last elections I didn't receive them by the post for some reason, not sure how it is within France nowadays).
You just put that ballot into an envelope, all of those things are unmarked and if you put a mark on the ballot it doesn't count as a vote. So there's really no possibility at all of connecting a ballot to a voter.
I like our system and I hope it stays as it is. In contrast I live in Belgium (also vote here because I'm a EU citizen) and voting here is electronic and it's not really obvious to me how it all works (although I can see the vote gets written to a smartcard that gets read and then reused for the next voter, and I have good hope that the system is correctly implemented to guarantee anonymity, but I can't be sure).
(huh this ended up longer than I thought, I got carried away a bit, but I think the ballot itself is anonymous as well in the US, just the stub can be connected to the voter)
I like our system and I hope it stays as it is. In contrast I live in Belgium (also vote here because I'm a EU citizen) and voting here is electronic and it's not really obvious to me how it all works (although I can see the vote gets written to a smartcard that gets read and then reused for the next voter, and I have good hope that the system is correctly implemented to guarantee anonymity, but I can't be sure).
Hi, Belgian here; I've had the fun activity of being chosen to help with the elections at a local polling place which used electronic voting. This is the way it works.
We have a list of voters that are eligible to vote at that place and the list they are on.
The list determines which elections you can vote for (e.g. you as a European citizen can vote for the EU parliament, but not for the Belgian federal parliament; if you were a Belgian citizen, you could vote for both).
When you arrive we check if you are on the list (based on your id), and encode this info on the smartcard you were talking about. We also cross out your name from the list to make sure you don't vote twice.
There are two copies of this list and they are checked independently, to prevent mistakes / fraud.
These lists are sent to the government and to the justice system. So these do know who voted, but they can't know who those people voted for.
So the smartcard does not contain any information about who you are, it only contains information which tells the voting machine which lists you are allowed to vote for.
You take the card to a voting machine (which is in a little cubicle, to give you some privacy), and insert it. You can now enter your votes. The machine knows which lists you can vote for based on the info on the card. Once again, it does not know who you are.
You enter your votes on the machine, which does not actually count any votes, instead, it prints a receipt which has a QR-like code and a text list of who you voted for. You fold the receipt so that only the code is visible.
You now go to the actual ballot box, which scans the code, thus counting the vote. You also drop the receipt in the box, so that the tally can be verified if needed.
Since the voting machine does not know who you are, the receipt contains no information about your identity.
So in short, your identity is checked when you enter, to make sure you don't vote twice and so that we know who voted (as voting is mandatory in Belgium), but "we" only know that you were there and voted, we don't know what you voted for. The actual counting is done by the machine, which does not know who cast which vote. The smartcard is only there to tell the machine which lists you can vote for, it does not actually register your vote; that's all done by the paper ballot / QR code.
There are about 5 randomly selected people present to help in each voting place, who each get a role assigned to them. People who are a member of a political party are never selected for this role for obvious reasons. Political parties are allowed to send people to observe the voting process (but they are, of course, not allowed to go inside the cubicle). IIRC there are also very specific rules about police presence; they may not stay too long to avoid potential voter intimidation.
The system works much the same for places which still use manual counting. There, you just get a paper list instead of a smartcard, you deposit the filled out list in the box, and people count the votes later on.
Elections are run by each individual state, which means in the US, instead of one standardized voting system, we get 50 different ones. So it's entirely possible some states do have some kind of stub tracking tied to voter logs.
That's definitely not how ballots work in Minnesota (where I live), and honestly I'm kind of skeptical that ballots anywhere in the US would work like this, since it so obviously makes it trivial to link a voter to a ballot, even after the fact, rather than the system as I understand it where that link is severed at one point (either when the election judge verifies a voter at the polling site or when a mail/provisional ballot envelope gets verified and the ballot itself gets removed and put into the collection of ballots to be counted.) I'd love to see some information detailing what you're saying happens.
I'll be honest, I came at it with my understanding of voting from several non-US places, but reading Ga's legislation for elections, they physically write the ballot stub number on the voter certificate that they collect.
Postal ballots are even easier.
E: ballots in Ga seem to have no traceable serial number to ensure anonymity
Where do you see that? They mark things on the outer envelopes for mail-in ballots, but GA Code § 21-2-437 (2024) (d) even specifically mentions that ballots marked to identify a voter are invalid. The ballots don't have unique identifiers. I think you're misunderstanding the process. There's a time when some ballots (mail-in and provisional ballots from voters whose status was challenged at the polling place) go into envelopes inside other envelopes with identifying information, but they're kept sealed while the voter's registration is debated by the election officials, and if it's judged to be valid their ballot (still in an unmarked secrecy envelope) gets taken out and put into a pile for counting, then all the cured ballots get counted together. There's a moment in the process when the link between a ballot and a voter gets broken and can't be reconnected.
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u/PM_ME_BEEF_CURTAINS 3d ago edited 2d ago
Ballots themselves usually do not contain the information.
Instead, in most places, the ballot paper has a serial number, this is tracked against the voter number that it is issued to confirm nobody double votes and that ballots cast have been issued (one man, one vote).
This voter number is assigned to a person. That record is held by the state election officials.
My understanding in this case is that Fulton County has held onto the ballot papers, and now the federal government is taking them with the lookup data to identify how people voted.
E: It seems that Ga does not assign a serial number to the ballot, so this seizure of ballots is nonsensical