[caption id=”attachment_104847″ align=”aligncenter” width=”3000″] (AP Photo/Seth Perlman)
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A federal decision in New Hampshire expanded free speech protections, allowing voters to take selfies with their ballots.
U.S. District Court Judge Paul Barbadoro, prompted by a legal challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union, struck down a New Hampshire law that banned posting images of completed ballots to social media sites.
In a blog post, Gilles Bissonnette, the legal director for the ACLU of New Hampshire, applauded the ruling, saying that “the First Amendment does not allow states to broadly ban innocent political speech with the hope that such a sweeping ban will address underlying criminal conduct.”
Laws prohibiting the display of a completed ballot within a voting booth aim to prevent vote selling. But those “ballot selfies” express political opinion that falls under speech protected by the First Amendment.
The struck-down New Hampshire law, passed in 2014, “intended to revise laws passed about a century ago when vote-buying was relatively widespread,” according to The Huffington Post.
A 2012 Washington Post article that examined election fraud and vote selling found that most cases of election fraud occurred with absentee ballots. Instances of voter fraud of any sort are rare. Adams County, Ohio had a nationwide reputation for “vote boodling” in the early 20th century, but the sordid history of fraud remains an interesting fact of history, more than a grave concern for the present.
Most states have some sort of law against showing marked ballots that target criminal activity, but this federal ruling sets a precedent for restraint on applying those laws to social media.
