Eric Trump broke the law by taking a photo of his ballot

(Image credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

published 8 November 2016

On Tuesday, Eric Trump, the son of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, wanted everyone to know that he cast his ballot for his dad. As proof, he took a photo of his ballot, with a darkened bubble above his father's name, and posted the photo on Twitter.

Unfortunately, this wasn't entirely legal. In the state of New York, the law states that "any person who ... makes or keeps any memorandum of anything occurring within the booth, or directly or indirectly, reveals to another the name of any candidate voted for by such voter; or shows his ballot after it is prepared for voting, to any person so as to reveal the contents ... is guilty of a misdemeanor."

The law is in place to prevent voter coercion. Ballot selfies are also illegal in New York, and "could get you a $1,000 fine, or up to a year in jail," writes New York magazine.

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The offending tweet has since been deleted.

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Ricky Soberano is the social media editor at TheWeek.com. Her writing has appeared in Complex, Nylon, Gothamist, Maxim, and others. Previously she was the culture editor for The Stony Brook Press and contributing editor for The Odyssey. She has a B.A. in multidisciplinary studies in journalism and dance from Stony Brook University and an A.S. in dance from Queensborough Community College. She's lived in Brooklyn her whole life, eats too much ramen, and freelance models, and she enjoys writing about the undiscovered and underreported within the sphere of culture. Follow her on Twitter.