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Mill and the Secret Ballot: Beyond Coercion and Corruption

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2007

ANNABELLE LEVER
ANNABELLE LEVER*
Affiliation:
University College London and University of [email protected]
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Abstract

In Considerations on Representative Government, John Stuart Mill concedes that secrecy in voting is sometimes justified but, nonetheless, maintains that it should be the exception rather than the rule. This article critically examines Mill's arguments. It shows that Mill's idea of voting depends on a sharp public/private distinction which is difficult to square with democratic ideas about the different powers and responsibilities of voters and their representatives, or with legitimate differences of belief and interest amongst voters themselves. Hence, it concludes, we should reject the assumption, which many of us share with Mill, that the secret ballot is justified only on prudential grounds and recognize how central privacy is to any democratic conception of citizenship and politics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , September 2007 , pp. 354 - 378
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

1 For the purposes of simplicity, I will hereafter refer to Considerations on Representative Government as CoRG. All page numbers are to the Everyman edition, edited by H. B. Acton, which also contains his essays Utilitarianism and On Liberty. I have the 1984 edition.

2 I had originally thought that Mill's use of the masculine pronoun simply indicated the fact that women did not have votes in his day. However, Mill's discussion of votes for women in the last pages of chapter 8 (p. 314 in the Everyman edition) suggests otherwise. He says ‘in the preceding argument . . . I have taken no account of difference of sex’, although the preceding argument, like the rest of the book, refers to voters as men and as ‘he’.

3 Mill believes that ‘the spirit of vote by ballot – the interpretation likely to be put on it in the mind of an elector – is that the suffrage is given to him for himself; for his particular use and benefit, and not as a trust for the public’ (324).

4 In fact, the report of the Power Inquiry cites a survey that found that 74% of the British population believed it was a duty to vote; although this diminished to 61% among 25–34-year-olds, and to 58% for 18–24-year-olds (Report, p. 58). They are referring to a MORI report of 2003 called ‘Public Opinion and the 2004 Elections’, and refer to the following website: http://www.electoralcommisision.org.uk/files/dms/FinalVotes2004Reportupdated2_18922-8545_E_N_S_W_.pdf.

5 This interpretation is supported by Nadia Urbinati's discussion of Mill's views on the secret ballot in her Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (Chicago, Ill.; 2002), pp. 104–22. I am generally sympathetic to her interpretation of Mill. However, I think she tends to elide republican and democratic ideas in ways that are problematic. It is not that the former have not deeply influenced the latter. It is rather that republican ideas are not intrinsically democratic, anymore than are liberal ideas, however influential the latter on democratic conceptions of politics.

6 The following Supreme Court cases help to illustrate the point. Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U. S. 79, (1986), concerning the exclusion of blacks from jury duty; and J. E. B. v. Alabama ex rel. T.B., 511 U. S. 127 (1994), concerning the exclusion of women.

7 The passage continues: ‘If he is compelled to pay, if he may be compelled to fight, if he is required implicitly to obey, he should be legally entitled to be told what for; to have his consent asked, and his opinion counted at its worth, though not at more than its worth. There ought to be no pariahs in a full-grown and civilized nation; no persons disqualified, except through their own default . . . No arrangement of the suffrage, therefore, can be permanently satisfactory in which any person or class is peremptorily excluded; in which the electoral privilege is not open to all persons of full age who desire to obtain it’ (302–3). Mill believes that people should be able to ‘read, write and, I will add, perform the common operations of arithmetic’ in order to vote (303). However, he seems to have thought – unrealistically – that after the first few years of operation, this demand would only exclude those who did not really care to vote (304).

8 Nadia Urbinati says of Mill's arguments, ‘while objectionable from a liberal point of view, they are not antidemocratic in principle’ (Mill on Democracy, p. 107). I agree with this – we are miles away from fascist uses of compulsory publicity. Mill's arguments seem to be intended to be compatible with democratic government and universal suffrage. However, key premises in his arguments, as here, are in tension with democratic ideas, not merely with liberal ones, and this tension illustrates some of the problems with assuming too quickly that republican and democratic ideas, whatever their affinities, are essentially the same or in harmony with each other.

9 In ‘Feminism and Republicanism: Is This a Plausible Alliance?’, Anne Phillips uses Mary Wollstonecraft to illustrate the problems that come from a republican concern with dependency and domination at the price of a concern with inequality itself. I think Mill's views here reflect a similar problem: that a concern with reaching a threshold – ‘the ability to determine one's own will’ – leads to indifference to morally and politically significant differences in power and resources above that threshold. See Anne Phillips, ‘Feminism and Republicanism: Is This a Plausible Alliance?’, Journal of Political Philosophy 8.2 (2000).

10 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, Book 3, p. 198, in The Basic Political Writings (Indianapolis, 1997).

11 In fact, as regards any individual voter, it is probably impossible for him or her to control or to predict the behaviour of other electors sufficiently to influence an election. If voters organize, and coordinate their actions, they may be able to have some effect on fellow voters but, by themselves, there is almost nothing that they can do to make their vote decisive or, even, of any special significance.

12 It is striking that Brennan and Pettit never confront this worry in their arguments for an open ballot. Moreover, they use the fact that, as individuals, voters are likely to have almost no effect on elections to reject the ‘Preference’ ideal of voting; they never consider its significance for their favoured view – the ‘Judgement’ ideal. See Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit, ‘Unveiling the Vote’, British Journal of Political Science 20.32 (July 1990), pp. 331–3. The argument against the preference ideal of voting is at p. 321.

13 For what appears to be a counter-example, see his comments on p. 315 quoted below, about the reasons why ‘Men, as well as women . . . need political rights’.

14 Mill makes the point at the beginning of chapter 3 in On Liberty: ‘opinions lose their immunity when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act’ (Mill, J. S., On Liberty (Indianapolis, 1978), p. 53Google Scholar).

15 For an excellent exposition of Nozick's views, and their difficulties, see Jonathan, Wolff, Robert Nozick: Property, Justice and the Minimal State (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar.

16 Jeremy, Waldron, Liberal Rights (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar, ch. 1.

17 I say ‘largely’ justified by the legitimate interests that they protect in deference to a recent, and very interesting, article on the controversy between interest and choice theories of rights. See Leif Wenar, ‘The Nature of Rights’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 33.3 (2005), pp. 223–53.

18 Nadia Urbinati notes, ‘there is no necessary connection between voting as a duty and the open ballot. The public good argument can justify voting as a duty, but does not in itself authorize openness . . . Similarly, the secret ballot does not prevent citizens from pursuing a collective search for solutions. It does not compromise their ability to discuss and understand the public good. It simply marks a distinction between deliberation and decision, and ensures that the latter is the outcome of the individual's autonomous judgment’ (Urbinati, Mill on Democracy, pp. 112–13).

19 Nadia Urbinati has an interesting discussion of the contrasts between James Mill and Rousseau's views on how individual wills and general wills are to be aligned. Both favoured secret voting. Urbinati notes that ‘Without postulating an autonomous public reason, the elder Mill could not explain how a disinterested vote could spring from a vote that was supposed to further individual interest. His son used publicity to fill this gap, and so preferred the open ballot’ (Mill on Democracy, p. 108). However, if I'm right, we here see that some sleight-of-hand, as well as hopes for publicity, were required to align private and public interest in John Stuart Mill's views, too. So, while I'm sympathetic to Urbinati's claim that ‘in arguing on behalf of the open ballot, Mill got at what is a significant problem of representative democracy – the inherent tension between private and public interests’ (Mill on Democracy, p. 104), I tend to think that his case for open voting suffered from these problems quite as much as it reflected on them.

20 Urbinati does not discuss this passage in her book. Instead, she discusses Mill's dispute with Henry Romilly, in 1865. She notes that Mill, rightly, took issue with Romilly's effort to assimilate membership in a state to membership in a club, by treating them both as voluntary. Moreover, she claims, Mill thought voting in clubs should be secret because ‘all members of a club are perfectly equal in relation to the requirements of membership’. Given the fact that their interests are similar, they have no need to consult the interests or desires of other people. Consequently, ‘when they are asked to vote, they only have to listen to their personal preferences’. She comments, ‘when electors are not perfectly equal, the secret ballot is pernicious because it does not oblige them to consider the interests of others and even encourages them to seek personal or class convenience. This shows how Mill understood suffrage principally in terms of its potential impacts on the community’ (Urbinati, Mill on Democracy, pp. 118–19, emphasis in the text). But this seems to ignore the realities that Mill is, clearly, assuming: that it is aristocrats who expect to hold workers to account, and therefore misses the fact that the class legislation Mill seems to be envisaging is all in one direction. That makes Mill's case against secrecy here much more troubling than Urbinati suggests.

21 Brennan and Pettit admit that the pressure created by open voting ‘may be unpleasant, and certainly will be for those untutored in saying where they stand . . .Under current institutions, political parties and their activists enjoy a monopoly of legitimacy in approaching voters and seeking to influence their vote. Under the regime we propose, a thousand voices would take the place of this single sort of intervention. The atmosphere might be bracing, but it would not be unhealthy’ (‘Unveiling the Vote’, p. 332). I wish I could feel as confident that divisions of class, sex, race and religion would be consistent with the seeming democracy of questioning that Brennan and Pettit here envisage.

22 For an eloquent statement of this idea, see John Rawls on fair equality of opportunity in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge Mass.. 1971), pt. 1, sect. 14, p. 84. In this passage, Rawls refers to ‘the realization of self which comes from a skillful and devoted exercise of social duties’. Rawls calls this ‘one of the main forms of human good’. Rawls's ideas, here, suggest one reason why democracies might hope to reconcile public and private interest – that we can get personal satisfaction from fulfilling public duties. Rawls's reasoning seems liberal quite as much as republican, in part because he is not simply concerned with political duties.

23 For an example of a controversial exception to general rules on the education of children, see Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972). Mill's views on the education of children, set out in chapter 5 of On Liberty, obviously concern more basic education, and seem predominantly concerned with the quality, rather than the quantity, of education. It seems likely that Mill would have deplored a system in which compulsory education was set in terms of the age at which one might leave school, rather than the quality of education achieved. So, it is possible that Mill would have been open to the possibility that Amish children could leave school earlier, provided that they had comparable educational attainments to those of other children. For Mill's views, see On Liberty, ch. 5, pp. 103–6 (Hacket edition).

24 I suppose that, strictly speaking, this is not voting based on personal, rather than, public duties, as the latter are insufficient for us to determine our vote. Still, the essential point is that we would be entitled to vote on private duties in these circumstances, whereas Mill supposes that the only thing that should determine our vote is the public interest.

25 It's not clear what Brennan and Pettit would make of this argument. On the one hand they say: ‘To vote in a discursively defensible manner is to vote in such a way that you are able to argue with others, at least to the extent that they are in a similar position, that they should follow the same path. It is to be able to represent your vote as a universalizable act: an act which is right, not just for you, but for anyone in the same sort of circumstances.’ This would seem to be consistent with the idea that private duties may, occasionally, be determinative. On the other hand, they say on the same page that you should vote on ‘considerations of the common good. They must bear, if not on matters of general welfare, at least on matters that all can recognize as relevant and important’ (‘Unveiling the Vote’, p. 324). The trouble is that, as long as you allow for reasonable pluralism in conceptions of the good – as they seem to – it's not at all clear that people will always be able to recognize each other's duties as ‘relevant and important’.

26 For an article that has greatly influenced my views on this matter, see Jonathan Wolff, ‘Fairness, Respect, and the Egalitarian Ethos’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 27 (1998), pp. 97–122. However, for a more positive attitude to shaming as an alternative to imprisonment, see Amitai Etzioni, The Limits of Privacy (New York, 1999), pp. 58–62.

27 In a fascinating article on political exile, Judith Shklar looks at exile or ostracism in Greek thought and practice as an example of the problem posed by exemplary individuals for democratic equality. See Judith N. Shklar, ‘The Bonds of Exile’, Political Thought, Political Thinkers, ed. Stanley Hoffman (Chicago, 1998), ch. 4, pp. 61, 66–7.

28 I had originally thought the phrase was Rawls's, but it seems originally to have been Cohen's, used to clarify what Rawls meant by the ‘fact’ of pluralism and the burdens of reason. See, for a very helpful discussion of Rawls's views on an overlapping consensus, Joshua, Cohen, ‘Moral Pluralism and Political Consensus’, The Idea of Democracy, ed. Copp, David, Hampton, Jean and Roemer, John E. (Cambridge, 1993), esp. pp. 281–5Google Scholar.

29 Brennan and Pettit clearly disagree. Secret voting, they claim, ‘is a lazy option, saving voters the trouble of having to defend themselves to others . . . it is a modest option, allowing people to shrink from making a public statement’ (‘Unveiling the Vote’, pp. 327–8). Frankly, I don't see why people shouldn't shrink from making a public statement, and unless voting is mandatory, I don't see why secret voting should be lazy. It's true, as they claim, that secret voting allows racist voting, symbolic voting, misguided voting. But the truth is, so does public voting, particularly where, as with Brennan and Pettit, the concern is only to ensure that one's family and immediate associates know anything about one's vote (Brennan and Pettit, ‘Unveiling the Vote’, p. 327). As these people may well share one's prejudices, interests and inclinations, it's not clear how beneficial their influence is likely to be. Nor is it obvious that whatever gains one might get in the quality of voting are not outweighed, from both an individual and collective perspective, by the costs to family, friendship, and a willingness to vote on the part of those who suffer the negative consequences of public voting.

30 See, for example, Catherine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, Mass.. 1987), ch. 8; and for a partly supportive, partly critical, appraisal of MacKinnon's claims, see Annabelle Lever, ‘Must Privacy and Sexual Equality Conflict? A Philosophical Examination of Some Legal Evidence’, Social Research 67.4 (Winter 2000).

31 See, for example, Anne, Phillips, Engendering Democracy (University Park, Pa., 1991)Google Scholar, esp. chs 1 and 4.

32 This article was presented as a paper to the J. S. Mill Bicentennial Conference at University College London in April 2006, and to the Department of Government, University of Essex, in June 2006. It was sparked by a question from David Miller, when I first mentioned Mill's views in 2003. A question from Véronique Munoz-Dardé in 2006 helped save me from a serious mistake when I finally came to write this article last year. Albert Weale suggested relevant readings, and asked helpful questions of the resulting arguments. I am very grateful to them all. Thanks are also due to the editor and to an anonymous reviewer for their helpful suggestions.