Editing 2066: Ballot Selfies

Without proof of how a vote was cast, if someone bribed (or even violently coerced) a voter to vote for candidate A, the voter could just vote 'B' and the coercer would be unable to tell whether they voted as instructed.  This is at the heart of the concept of "a secret ballot".  But if ballot-selfies or other proof-of-vote mechanisms are permitted then the evil-doer can demand verification that the voter did what they were coerced to do — and this jeopardizes the idea of a truly free and fair election.

However, the "secret ballot" principle is not universally valued nor enforced. Some voting machines produce a paper receipt showing the choices the voter made — and many jurisdictions permit use of a postal ballot — so there are plenty of other ways to circumvent the law in those places.  So the ban on ballot selfies is harder to justify unless those other lines of coercion are also ruled out.

On the other hand, the desire to take and distribute ballot selfies often comes from an excitement in participating in the voting process and the desire to share that excitement in the hopes of encouraging others to vote, and anything that helps get more people to the polls is generally considered to be a good thing. In addition, the law is incredibly difficult to enforce — there is little way to prevent somebody from photographing their ballot and privately showing this photo to somebody else — and the practice of enforcing it (i.e. searching for possible photographic devices all together) would make the local government incredibly unpopular.  Lastly, voters storing evidence of their votes could be useful to prevent voting fraud performed by the state.