Federal court to decide if ballot selfies are tool of free speech or coercion

The issue of whether or not ballot selfies should be allowed will go to a federal court.

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Is taking a photo of your ballot an expression of free speech or a potential receipt for a ballot-buyer? A federal court of appeals plans to decide just that Tuesday when a group of judges from the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston will evaluate a New Hampshire ban on ballot selfies, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Ballot secrecy laws date back to an era when it was more common to try to buy votes, and since at least 1979 it has been illegal for a New Hampshire voter to show his or her ballot to anyone else as a means of confirming for whom he or she voted. In 2014, that was clarified to include "taking a digital image or photograph of his or her marked ballot and distributing or sharing the image via social media."

But in court in 2015, the ban was ruled unconstitutional because New Hampshire officials didn't give any evidence indicating ballot selfies have ever actually been used in a vote-buying operation or as a means of coercion. Rather, free speech advocates say that by banning selfies, New Hampshire is infringing on a person's political speech. "The ballot selfie captures the very essence of that process as it happens — the pulled lever, the filled-in bubble, the punched-out chad — and thus dramatizes the power that one person has to influence our government," Snapchat Inc., the social media company behind the eponymous temporary photo-messaging app, argued in a filing on the case last April.

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Even lacking any solid evidence, New Hampshire doesn't see it the same way as Snapchat, The Wall Street Journal reports. A lawyer working in support of the ban argued in March: The ban "[ensures] purity and integrity of our elections by protecting the longstanding tradition of the secret ballot."

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.