Proponents of voting selfies think they could encourage others to vote. Erich Ebel, a spokesman for Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman at the time, told CNN in 2018 that voting selfies “could even encourage more people to submit their own ballots before the deadline.” In a recent Instagram video, Whoopi Goldberg fills out her absentee ballot in New York State and joins other prominent precocious voters like Zoë Kravitz, Elle Fanning, Joe Jonas, Tracee Ellis Ross and Lily Collins, all of whom recently posted photos of their ballots or “I Voted” stickers on social media. The explosion of social media and “selfie” culture has also challenged the traditional thinking that voters should not disclose how they voted. Many young people who share everything on social media find it logical that they can share a photo of their ballot with their friends and followers. The “Get out the vote” organizations also find that the display of these “voting selfies” is a motivating factor for young people to participate in the voting process. Then, as now, each state established its own rules of conduct for voting. Today, an “election selfie” is fine in more than half of the country, but illegal in states like South Carolina, Texas and Nevada. It goes even further. Share someone else`s ballot on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, or “like” or “retweet” to be shared on a page, and, well, you can be complicit under Section 104.045, Florida Statutes: According to a recent study, 44 states have constitutional provisions that guarantee the secrecy of the vote, and the rest of the states have legal requirements about it.

In addition to explicitly calling for a secret ballot, many states have also seen reasons over time to ban or restrict the use of cameras at polling stations. These were adopted both to protect voters` privacy and to limit disruption in the polling station. A record number of Americans were able to vote by mail or earlier this year, and due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans are increasingly turning to social media to show that they have voted. Despite objections from Mill and others warning against allowing people to vote privately, in the 1890s the United States adopted the idea that the government should provide you with a ballot and that voting should actually take place behind closed doors. In the United States, there is no federal law on election selfies, so the matter is left to each state. [16] Some U.S. states ban election selfies, impose fines or jail time for violations, while other states have no ban. [17] In some states, laws prohibit photography at a polling station, but do not restrict the photograph of absentee ballots.

[1] “Sharing a voting selfie is a great representation of citizen participation,” said Marc Levine, a member of the California State Assembly who led the 2016 bill amendment trial. Thanks to secret ballots, no one can confirm how you will vote in November, but this has not always been the case. Previously, voting was a public matter. The University of Virginia website reports how eligible U.S. voters — “all the men of the time” — would do so either by viva voce (calling their favorite candidates) or by “dropping a highly visible note in a clear box or glass or dropping it off to an election official.” In short, voting was once a “mass spectacle,” a rough affair that defined “the political worlds of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Lincoln.” With social media and the ubiquity of cell phone cameras making it easy to share labeled ballots, election officials have been forced to consider the age-old problem their predecessors believed they could solve: Should we restrict free speech at the ballot box? Some states, such as California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nebraska, Oregon, and Utah, have recently updated their laws for the social media era by passing laws that explicitly allow voters to post photos of their labeled ballots. Other states have passed laws that further restrict the use of photography and phones at polling stations, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. “A lot of our election laws in New Jersey were written at the turn of the century, at a time when there was a lot of voter fraud,” said Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University.