CHARLOTTE, N.C. — This election season has been rife with various claims about what others can discover about a person's voting profile.
With a lot of political messaging this election about people being registered as a certain political party but choosing this time to vote for the candidate across the aisle, political ads reminding voters they can secretly cast their ballot for a specific candidate without others knowing, and text messages that claim public records can reveal whether a person has voted in years past, there have been some questions over whether others can find out information about your vote.
The Question
Is how you vote public information?
The Sources
- Michael Dickerson, Mecklenburg County Elections Director
- Scott Huffmon, Political Science professor, Winthrop University
- Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (a component of the Department of Homeland Security)
The Answer
No, how you vote is not public information; however, other aspects of your voter profile could be.
What we found
Dickerson said there are many safeguards in place to ensure the privacy of a person's vote during the actual voting process and afterward. For in-person voting, he said there are dividers and distance requirements between people and election officials, and for voting by mail, there are strict ballot secrecy methods.
"We even encourage people, when you vote your ballot, and you're inserting the voting card, turn it upside down," Dickerson said, of in-person ballot-casting.
He also said there is no avenue for a person's vote to be made public.
"That is nobody's business but your own," Dickerson said.
Dickerson said that voting information is also deleted after a period of time.
"Basically, after 22 months, I can get rid of everything," Dickerson said. "So, that's what I like doing."
That said, there are parts of a person's voter profile that could be made public.
"What they can find out, and anybody can find out from your voter registration: your name, your address, if you've registered by party or unaffiliated in North Carolina, they can find out which elections you've shown up to vote in," Huffmon said.