In Defence of Publicised Voting

The secret ballot is often seen as a centrepiece of democratic elections, helping guarantee they are free, fair and that votes reflect citizens’ genuine preferences. However, J. S. Mill and a few contemporary writers have argued that voting in public could augment public deliberation. Against it, are considerations of corruption, civic shame (at inability to defend one’s voting choice) and democratic distortion (voting in more socially acceptable or extreme ways). I distinguish between voting in public and the public knowing one’s voting choice and defend the latter on non-consequentialist grounds as part of the ideal of democracy. Building on the assumption that coercive power of democratic states is authorised by the people and exercised in their name, I claim that it is a necessary condition of the justifiability of coercive power is that it’s addressed to those subject to it: the coerced can then in principle address their coercers in return. If voters have access to knowledge of each other’s voting choices, they know how each of them proposed to shape the law to which all are subject: they enjoy mutual minimal answerability. I defend the principle of mutual answerability through the notion of second-personal moral accountability. I maintain that voters have a non-legal civic duty to offer their fellow citizens an explanation of their voting choice, though this duty only obtains in a reasonably just society, thus addressing concerns about civic shame. Finally, I argue that the principle of mutual answerability does not rest upon a controversial view of democracy’s normative foundations. The argument is compatible with locating the intrinsic (if not instrumental) value of democracy in ideals of relational equality, epistocracy, or individuals’ fundamental interest in justice, among other justifications. It remains true that avoiding corruption, civic shame and democratic distortions favour retaining the secret ballot for the time being in actually existing democracies. But I conclude that this does not detract from the cogency of publicised voting as a constituent of the democratic ideal.