“Your vote is secret”: Voting and ballot secrecy (Part II).

Pursuant (LOL) to my previous post on voting and ballot secrecy, I will now explain what the phrase “Your vote is secret” means.

Common misinterpretation (or myth):

You cannot tell anyone how you voted or how you intend to vote, because that’s a secret.

NOPE.

Correct interpretation:

• Your vote/voting intention is only a secret if you want it to be a secret from everyone else.

• Your physical vote is secret i.e. after you slot your voting slip into the ballot box, it will not be traced back to you.
  
  Please refer to this post to find out why.

• You can tell people how you voted/how you intend to vote. There’s no law which mandates that you keep your vote/voting intention a secret.
  
  In fact, you should discuss your voting inclination as often as you can.
  
  Discussions of voting decisions, processes, etc. are always healthy and fruitful – so long as these discussions are conducted in a healthy manner, of course, with healthy people who are willing to listen to you, as opposed to, say, antagonising/intimidating/irritating/pooh-poohing you.

• The only way to confirm how you actually voted would be to:

1. Obtain a court order to open up the ballot boxes (and – mind you – there needs to be a good reason for this),
   
2. Trace your polling card number to the voting slip number, then
   
3. Find the correct voting slip hidden among the hundreds of voting slips in the ballot box.

Who is going to go to all that trouble?

Addendum:

Agagooga a.k.a. Gabriel Seah made a very insightful comment on Twitter about this:

One should vote holistically. If I had to agree with everything a party/candidate said I’d spoil my vote.