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Comment by jdavis703 | Hacker News Reader

I worked at the polls in California for the first time this year. We were required to post a public list of everyone who voted including their address. It's posted on the outside of the polling place for anyone to review if they so choose.

The point of anonymous voting is to ensure that the voter's choices are secret, not to conceal the fact that someone voted. Even in Afghanistan where voting can cost your life, purple dye is placed on a finger to maintain a rudimentary system of tracking who has voted and who hasn't.

EDIT: Let me add, I'm no Kemp apologist, but let's keep the focus on the real failures that occurred in GA... Not exaggerated problems.

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Electoral Rolls are public information in Australia, you need special dispensation to be removed from them; there's no bulk access to them, it's protected access but it's not private data

https://www.ecsa.sa.gov.au/enrolment/the-electoral-roll

What I don't get is that the state tracks party affiliation and publishes it. This information should not be public or even better not tracked.

Not all states track a party affiliation (mine doesn't), but most of those that do do it to track voting in primaries.

I wish I understood why the state runs a primary election. That seems like it should be the responsibility of the party to decide who their nominee is. Should be their own rules, and cost

I agree that it makes sense in the abstract that ostensibly private organizations conduct themselves as they see fit. But in the U.S. the practical reality is that the Democratic and Republican Parties are effectively official institutions. If voters' only input was to choose between two people secretly selected by these organizations, it wouldn't be very democratic. And imagine that happening in the many U.S. voting districts where the same party always wins - it would be completely undemocratic.

On the other hand, IIRC my history, before maybe the 1970s the U.S. parties did use more private processes, selecting candidates in the 'smoke-filled room' (the image is of fat old men smoking cigars and making deals). Some say the quality of candidate was better then.

Some states they do. In my state, the Democrats hold caucuses instead of primaries (even though the state runs primaries anyway—weird story), and I think at their own expense. Running an election is a pretty big operation (you need to register voters, check that they're eligible, set up and staff either polling places or mail-in sites, and so on. The state already has most of that infrastructure, and it seems wasteful to duplicate it. I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if some (or all) primary states allow third parties to register to have their primaries run as well.

Next you will discover they hand it to a usually partisan vendor that runs their voter file.

The parties want it, they have given themselves special privileges and don't want non-members to share.

The notion that the state of Georgia tracks party affiliation is false. Georgia Does not have party registration. the only thing it tracks is which party ballot you pull in a primary election. You can make some inferences about party affiliation by looking at the voter's history....but that is not always a reliable indicator of true party affiliation.

If the state runs a partisan primary, they often want to know which party you're registered in so they can give you the correct ballot.

Some state like mine put everyone on the same ballot for the partisan primaries, and the instructions tell you to only vote in the column for your party, and if you vote in multiple parties your ballot is tossed out. Hence, we don't track which party you're "registered" as, because we don't need it - with the tradeoff of slightly more complex ballots .

> purple dye is placed on a finger to maintain a rudimentary system of tracking who has voted and who hasn't.

It happens in India as well, its to prevent same person voting multiple times.

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