[DW] Site - US "Who Voted" Website Provides Public Access to Voter Lists
From:
James Gilmour
Date:
Nov 12 23:39 UTC
Short link
Steven Clift > Sent: Friday, November 07, 2008 3:32 PM via NEWSWIRE
> See:
> http://whovoted.net
Why should any of this information be in the public domain?
What aspect of "the public interest" is being served by allowing me to see
whether you voted?
There MAY be a public interest element to allowing a non-voter to discover that
s/he is recorded as having voted, but what could
they then do? The incorrect record may indicate a genuine mistake or it may
indicate personation. But what to do in either case?
There is no significant public interest element in allowing a voter to see that
s/he has been recorded as having voted, because that
does not mean that their vote has been counted or has been counted for the
candidate they wished. Those verifications would require
a very different procedure.
Information about your membership or non-membership of a political party should
not be in the public domain - for ordinary electors,
it should be a wholly private matter.
State and federal authorities and state and federal laws should have no place
in the internal elections of political parties to
choose their candidates for public elections. Such elections should be private
matters for the members of the parties concerned.
The role of state or federal law in such private matters should be limited to
providing the back-stop of "natural justice" for the
members of a political party that fails to comply with its own internal
electoral regulations or which adopts regulations that do
not comply with the accepted rules of "natural justice".
James Gilmour