Practicing Ballot Secrecy: Postal Voting and the Witness Requirement at the 2019 Finnish Elections

Abstract

Electoral rights belong to the core of citizenship in democratic nation-states. Voting, then, represents an actualization of the relationship between the citizen and the political community. For citizens living outside the country in which they are eligible to vote, voting signifies a rare institutional connection to the country of origin. The aim of this article is to explore the introduction of the postal vote, a new form of voting for external voters at Finnish elections, from the grassroots perspective. The study focuses on how a central policy concern, safeguarding ballot secrecy, was resolved in the policy implementation by the witness requirement, and how the individual voters subsequently applied it. According to the voters’ accounts of the act of voting, the adopted method for underlining the importance of ballot secrecy in the Finnish overseas postal voting system, for many voters, makes little sense. While they effectively practice ballot secrecy, many fail to demonstrate this to the witnesses they were supposed to convince. Conversely, for these voters, the witness requirement merely works to break the secondary secrecy of elections, namely the secrecy of their participation itself. The empirical material for the article comprises policy documents and thematic text material (interviews, written responses) from 31 Finnish citizens living outside Finland. The article contributes to the scholarly debates on voting as a social, institutional and material practice. It further provides policy-relevant knowledge about grassroots implementation to various electoral administrations many of which, at the time of writing, face pressure to reform their repertoire of voting methods to function better in exceptional circumstances, such as a pandemic.

Signed, Sealed, and Delivered with Trust: Non-Resident Citizens’ Experiences of Newly Adopted Postal Voting

“…More research is needed to scrutinize which practices, if any, make it possible to maintain lawfulness and a high level of electoral integrity in settings in which postal voting takes place without witnesses. To what extent the witness requirement works to guarantee the lawfulness of the postal vote should also be further investigated (see Weide, 2021).…”

With pulling ties, electoral participation flies: factors mobilising turnout among non-resident Finnish voters

“…Voters also have to rely on the efficiency of the post to deliver the ballots in time. This is echoed by recent findings suggesting that trust acts as a moderator between distance to the polling station and non-resident Finns' probability of postal voting (Nemčok and Peltoniemi 2021;Wass et al 2021;Weide 2021).…”