Opinion: Sorry, Grimes: ‘Secrecy of the ballot box’ not an out for nervous politicians

It’s the campaign gaffe heard ‘round the world, or at least the political world. Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky, refuses to say whether she voted for President Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Kentucky is one of several states in which Obama is an albatross for Democratic candidates for the Senate. Grimes told the editorial board of the Louisville Courier-Journal that she would remain mum because “;I respect the sanctity of the ballot box.”

She doubled down on her refusal in a debate with her opponent, Republican Sen. McConnell, linking her reticence to her current job as Kentucky’s secretary of state.

“Our constitution grants us here in Kentucky the constitutional right for privacy at the ballot box, for a secret ballot,” Grimes said. “You have that right, Sen. McConnell has that right, every Kentuckian has that right and as secretary of state, the chief elections officer, I’m tasked with overseeing and making sure we are enforcing all of our election laws and I’ve worked very closely especially with the members of our military to ensure ... privacy at the ballot box.”

This is, to quote Jeremy Bentham, “nonsense on stilts.” As secretary of state, Grimes is charged with preventing the disclosure by government of how a voter cast her ballot. But neither the Kentucky Constitution nor common sense creates any impediment to a voter’s voluntarily announcing how she voted. And it’s not playing “gotcha!” for a journalist to ask a candidate how she voted: It’s an important, if not the only, window on her political views.

Also, Grimes is selective about disclosing whom she supported in presidential races. She told the editorial board that “I was actually in ’08 a delegate for Hillary Clinton and I think that Kentuckians know I’m a Clinton Democrat, through and through.” This was followed by the line about the sanctity of the ballot box.

Chuck Todd of NBC News said that Grimes’ “disqualified herself” with her demurral. I wouldn’t go that far, but her response was craven and self-defeating.

The controversy over Grimes’ gaffe taps into a continuing discussion about anonymity and political expression, a subject that has figured in debates about campaign-finance law and the alleged privacy rights of contributors to controversial ballot measures such as California’s Proposition 8.

In 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a claim that people who signed petitions seeking to outlaw same-sex domestic partnerships had a right to keep their names a secret. In his concurring opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia ridiculed the notion that citizens are entitled to remain anonymous when they legislate through a referendum process or petition the government for a redress of grievances.

“Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed,” Scalia wrote. “For my part, I do not look forward to a society which, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously and even exercises the direct democracy of initiative and referendum hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism. This does not resemble the Home of the Brave.”

Scalia also disputed the conventional wisdom that the secret ballot is an ancient and integral part of American democracy. He noted that voting in America was public until 1888, when states began to adopt the Australian secret ballot. As for the Supreme Court: “We have acknowledged the existence of a 1^st Amendment interest in voting, but we have never said that it includes the right to vote anonymously. The history of voting in the United States completely undermines that claim.”

I doubt even Scalia wants to return to the days of public voting. The secret ballot serves a lot of purposes, including allowing citizens to cast their vote free of intimidation or fear of reprisal.

But political candidates such as Grimes are in a different category: When they seek office, they are asking the voters to ratify their political views. A candidate who refuses to disclose one important manifestation of those views – how she voted in a presidential election – isn’t defending the “sanctity of the ballot box”; she’s playing a political game.

Follow Michael McGough on Twitter @MichaelMcGough3