The secret ballot is well understood. We have long recognized that secrecy allows people to vote without coercion, and avoids corruption, such as vote buying.

This is the origin of the law in Minnesota that requires ballots that have been marked in an unauthorized way to be discarded, uncounted.

Prior to the advent of secret ballots, scholars and historians note that vote buying corruption was common practice. Voters would use marked ballots to provide evidence that they voted the “right” way and collect their bounty.

Minnesota  Statutes Chapter 204C.18 is aimed squarely at vote buying fraud. It prohibits a voter from making any unauthorized marks on his ballot. Protections of this sort have been in place for many years.

Preventing this sort of corruption is hard, but prohibiting identifying marks on the ballots makes it difficult for corrupt voters to collect their bounties.

The Minnesota legislature is removing these safeguards. House bill HF1841 and its companion bill in the senate, SF1663 strip out this language, and allow voters to identify their ballots. This will allow those ballots to be identified and counted. Any corrupt vote counter will have an easy way to identify who voted for who, and reward those voters.

It is foolish to think that there are not people who would like to buy votes. Removing this language from Minnesota statutes makes it much easier. I cannot think of a good reason to make this change.

I have a rule: Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence. I choose to believe that the legislators pushing this awful idea are simply not familiar with the history, and are not considering the costs. They have no experience with rampant corruption, and are therefore not afraid of it. They are not intending to invite corruption, but by making it easy, they are inadvertently begging for it.

Let’s learn from our history rather than future disasters. Contact your Minnesota  legislators. This is a terrible idea.

Follow me on Twitter:  @donlee1037