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For more than a century, American elections have operated around a simple promise: who you voted for is a secret. But a bill moving through the Indiana legislature would undermine that promise — at least for people who vote early.
House Bill 1359 would let counties have early voters feed their completed ballots directly into a scanning machine instead of placing them in a sealed secrecy envelope. It would then allow those ballots to be scanned starting on the first day of early voting, rather than waiting until closer to Election Day.
On its own, that process isn’t unusual — it’s similar to how ballots are handled at in-person polling places on Election Day. But the bill also authorizes counties to generate a unique identifier connected to each voter during early voting, print that number on the voter’s ballot, and allow officials to retract a scanned ballot if its voter is later found ineligible. That combination weakens the traditional separation between a voter’s identity and the ballot they cast.
Election officials and voting rights advocates argue those changes touch one of the most fundamental protections in modern democracy.
“Voters expect that when they cast a ballot, it is done privately, without the ability of clerks or staff to determine an individual’s actual vote,” Marion County Clerk Kate Sweeney Bell, a Democrat, said in a statement. The public is already “fatigued from political partisanship,” she said, and the additional requirements “will ramp up pressure on our staff and poll workers at the point of highest activity.”
The bill advanced out of committee the same day lawmakers added — without public testimony — an amendment that would reduce Indiana’s early voting period from 28 days to 16. If the measure passes, the changes would take effect before the May primary.
To understand why this matters, it helps to zoom out.
For the first half of American history, votes were cast publicly — often orally or by depositing colored party tickets into transparent containers — so that everyone present, including party operatives, knew exactly how each person voted. As a result, elections were rife with vote-buying, employer coercion, and party surveillance.
That started to change when states began adopting the secret ballot — also called the Australian ballot, after the country that exported the concept to the U.S. — in the 1880s and 1890s. States started printing their own ballots and setting up private voting booths so voters could mark their choices confidentially, fundamentally transforming elections from open spectacles into private acts.
Allowing ballots to be scanned within a system that uses voter-specific identifiers — and making those ballots retractable — is a step back in the opposite direction. Election scholars have long warned that even perceived weakening of ballot secrecy can erode public confidence, regardless of whether misuse occurs.
Support for the proposal has come primarily from Republican lawmakers, including Rep. Tim Wesco, who authored the bill, and Senate Elections Committee Chair Mike Gaskill, who offered the amendment to shorten early voting. Supporters have framed the changes as administrative improvements, arguing they would reduce costs, ease strain on county election offices, and allow for more efficient processing of early ballots.
During committee debate, however, lawmakers did not directly address how the early voting identifier system would affect the longstanding practice of keeping a voter’s identity separate from their ballot choices.
At least one Republican lawmaker, Sen. Greg Walker, voted against the piece because he opposes shortening early voting, citing concerns about its impact on voters in his district. So far, there have been no public reports of Republican lawmakers opposing the early voting identifier provision or raising concerns about its implications for ballot secrecy.
If you have questions about how ballots are handled in your county — or how this proposal would change that — shoot us an email. We want to hear from you.
Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.
