Why separate an opinion from a vote?

My Vote Forward separates opinions from votes because they do different jobs and attract different harms. An opinion is a view on a particular wording that a person may revise or choose to share; a vote is a final choice on an official ballot that must stay secret, because open voting historically “left them vulnerable to intimidation and coercion,” as Australia’s electoral commission puts it. Survey research also shows that wording changes answers, and deliberation research shows that views move with information, so treating an early opinion as a commitment to a vote would misrepresent people.

The objection in its strongest form

The objection to My Vote Forward’s separation is that it complicates something simple. People have political views and express them by voting. Splitting “priorities,” “opinions,” and “votes” into three activities with three sets of rules adds vocabulary without adding democracy. Worse, the critic says, it invites a kind of dishonesty: if someone can publicly support a proposal and then privately vote against it, the public record of opinion becomes cheap talk. A campaign that collects thousands of public opinions in favor of a measure may lose at the ballot box, and the framework will have produced a misleading signal.

A second version argues that the separation undermines accountability. Public positions are how citizens hold each other, and officials, to their word. Encouraging private opinions and revisable positions, the critic says, removes the social commitment that makes political participation serious.

Why the objection matters

The separation matters for My Vote Forward because it is the framework’s central design choice. If it is confusing, readers will not understand what results mean. If it encourages cheap talk, opinion releases will mislead. And if it weakens accountability, it undercuts the framework’s goal of making participation more informative. See the framework for the full statement of the three parts.

Defined terms

• Opinion: in the framework, a view on a specific, worded question or proposal, including direction and strength, stored with the wording it answered. See opinion and opinions.
• Vote: a choice recorded on an official ballot in an election run by a legally responsible authority. See ballot.
• Secret ballot: a method of voting in which no one can learn how a particular voter voted. See secrecy and the secret ballot.
• Social desirability bias: the tendency to give answers that look good to others rather than true answers.
• Wording effect: a change in answers caused by how a question is phrased or what options are offered. See question design.

Evidence

The historical case for a secret vote is well documented. The Australian Electoral Commission’s history notes that “Until the 1850s, people voted publicly, which left them vulnerable to intimidation and coercion,” and that what came to be called the “Australian ballot, otherwise now known as the secret ballot” was implemented to address this.⁠¹ A Congressional Research Service overview of the secret ballot in the United States describes the same problem in elections before the secret ballot became standard: the lack of privacy “enabled efforts to influence voters’ choices,” made it “easier for individuals engaged in vote buying to confirm that voters marked their ballots as arranged,” and made it “harder for voters to shield their selections from people who might try to coerce or intimidate them”.⁠² The key mechanism is verification. A buyer or a boss can only enforce a deal if they can see the vote. Secrecy breaks that link.

Opinions differ because they are tied to wording. Pew Research Center reports an experiment in which 58% of respondents chose the economy as the most important issue when it was offered as an option, while only 35% volunteered it in an open-ended version.⁠³ Pew states that “the choice of options provided, how each option is described,” and “the order in which options are read can all influence how people respond”.⁠³ An opinion on one wording is therefore not the same as a position on the different wording that may later appear on a ballot.

Opinions also move with information. In the “America in One Room” deliberative poll, more than 500 registered voters who deliberated over a long weekend showed “large, depolarizing changes in their policy attitudes” compared with a control group.⁠⁴ Whatever one thinks of deliberation, the finding shows that an opinion recorded before people learn more can differ substantially from the view they hold afterward.

How comparable systems have handled it

Existing democratic practice already separates expression from voting, though rarely in one system.

• Polls and ballots. Public opinion polls measure views; elections decide. No one treats a poll response as a vote, and polls regularly differ from results.
• Petitions and ballots. Signing a petition to put a measure on the ballot is public in many places, and the United States Supreme Court held in 2010 that disclosure of referendum petitions “does not as a general matter violate the First Amendment”.⁠⁵ The vote on the measure itself is secret. The same person can sign to let voters decide and then vote no. See how is this different from petitions?.
• Deliberative processes. Citizens’ assemblies record recommendations after deliberation, not votes on law, and send them to elected bodies. See citizens’ assembly.

The framework’s contribution is to state these distinctions together, with different disclosure rules attached, rather than to invent them.

Competing interpretations

One interpretation holds that public commitment improves deliberation. When people state positions openly, they must give reasons and accept responsibility. On this view, private opinions encourage thoughtless answers.

A second interpretation holds that public positions invite pressure. Social desirability bias distorts self-reports on sensitive topics, and people under social or economic pressure may state what is expected. On this view, privacy improves honesty, though for this framework that remains a hypothesis to test. See opinions.

A third interpretation accepts both: public argument is valuable for people who choose it, and privacy is necessary for those who need it. That is the framework’s position, which makes sharing voluntary and specific rather than either mandatory or forbidden.

What the framework answers

My Vote Forward’s rules follow from the distinctions above.

• Votes are secret, always. The framework offers no setting that reveals a vote, and it never tries to link a named person’s opinion to their ballot. See private voting.
• Opinions are private by default and shareable one at a time. A person chooses to share a specific opinion on a specific item. There is no public profile. See consent.
• Opinions are tied to wording and can be revised. Each opinion is stored with the exact item version. Revisions are dated and never flagged publicly as reversals. See what if someone changes position?.
• A gap between opinions and results is not evidence of lying. The framework never treats a difference between an opinion release and an election result as dishonesty. See opinion and choice.

Hypothetical example. A participant shares a public opinion supporting “a new library funded by a small property tax increase.” Months later, the official ballot measure proposes a larger increase and a different site. The participant votes against it in a secret ballot. Under the framework, the earlier opinion stays tied to the earlier wording, and nothing suggests the participant was inconsistent.

Where the objection still wins

The objection wins on simplicity. Three activities with three disclosure rules are harder to explain than “say what you think and vote,” and the demo has no evidence about whether participants understand the distinctions. The objection also has a point about cheap talk: opinion releases built from voluntary, revisable, partly public opinions will not predict election results, and some readers will treat them as predictions anyway. Finally, the claim that privacy improves the honesty of opinions is untested in this setting.

Unresolved questions

• Do participants understand the difference between a priority, an opinion, and a vote? A usability study could measure this.
• Does private-by-default reduce social desirability bias in this setting?
• How should releases present the relationship between opinions on a draft and a later official ballot measure?
• Should strength of opinion be recorded, given that strength may change more than direction?

Related

• Opinions
• Private voting
• The secret ballot
• Opinion and choice
• Can someone be punished for an opinion?
• Hard questions