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| - While there are some aspects of one's voter registration available via public voter lists that vary state to state, votes for specific candidates are secret across the entire United States, including Indiana. A rumor to the contrary supposedly originated with a text message from Indiana Republican Party, but this has not been confirmed.
On Nov. 4, 2024, the day before Election Day in the United States, a text message allegedly from the Indiana Republican Party claimed, "Voting records are public — your friends, neighbors, and family will know if you stood with Trump when it mattered most."
A screenshot of the text message was shared in a post on X with the comment, "Who you vote for is private."
Other users chimed in, including the Indiana Democratic Party, which declared the text message as "nothing more than voter intimidation from the party becoming experts at it."
Another person posted, "It's public information that a person has voted. The actual votes are private and as usual the gop [sic] is lying."
(@adamwren on X)
Indeed, while there is some information available publicly regarding a citizen's vote or voting status, their actual ballot is confidential in every U.S. state, including Indiana.
Specifics vary between states, but when a citizen registers to vote, certain pieces of their information become public record and are therefore required for disclosure in certain contexts, like political campaigns. In Indiana, the following entities are able to request access to these voter lists:
Political parties, independent candidates, a member of the media for publication in a news broadcast or newspaper, the chief justice of the supreme court and clerks of U.S. district courts for administering the jury management system, the speaker and minority leader of the house of representatives, the president pro tempore and the minority leader of the senate.
However, the votes cast by any specific individual are protected nationwide. According to the Election Assistance Commission (emphasis added):
Though the price, availability, and type of data in the voter file varies by state, voter files never include information about who a person voted for in any election. This is because a voter's decision of who to vote for is private – a "secret ballot." The voter file may, however, include a voter's partisan affiliation, which elections the voter participated in, or the voter's method of voting. The list of which elections a voter participated in is referred to as a "voter history". For voters who vote by mail, this history is often updated when the ballot is received; for voters who vote in person, this history is often not updated until after the election results are certified.
In addition, in Indiana specifically, a person's date of birth, driver's license number, gender, telephone number, email address, voting history, voter registration ID number and the date of registration remain confidential even when a public list is accessed.
The secret ballot method of voting, also referred to as "the Australian secret ballot", was first adopted in the United States in 1888 in Louisville, Kentucky, and the state of Massachusetts, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS).
Prior to the secret ballot, voting was most often conducted by announcing one's vote verbally or via a ticket printed by the political parties and deposited into a ballot box in public view.
According to "Secrecy in Voting in American History: No Secrets There" by Donald A. DeBats, Ph.D.:
Both modes of voting produced the same result: individual votes were knowable in that they could either be seen (party-tickets) or be heard (viva voice). This was the common theme of all elections in America's political history until the threshold of the twentieth century. And it made sense: in those times political choices were understood to be communal, not private, matters. Voting to advance private individual interests calls for secrecy — but public voting made perfect sense when politics was understood to be about group or communal interests.
According to the CRS' report, this lack of privacy had consequences for elections. "It made it easier for individuals engaged in vote buying to confirm that voters marked their ballots as arranged, for example, and harder for voters to shield their selections from people who might try to coerce or intimidate them into changing them."
By the end of the nineteenth century, 38 states had adopted the secret ballot. In 1950, South Carolina adopted it as well, completing the nationwide switch to the new voting method.
Snopes reached out to the Indiana GOP to confirm if the alleged text message originated from or was authorized by the party and will update this article if we hear back.
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