We might not need totally secret ballot...

Thad Hall over at the Election Updates blog rightly points out in "An Interesting Question: Do We Need Secret Ballots?" the flawed thinking of Lynn Landes' article "Scrap the 'Secret' Ballot -- Return to Open Voting". As Hall points out, Landes quickly dismisses coercion and doesn't address vote-selling at all.

However, as Doug Jones once pointed out to me, there's a spectrum of ballot secrecy to consider here; it's not just a simple matter of total secrecy versus ballots identifiable to individuals. In fact, the UK doesn't have pure ballot secrecy; voters have unique numbers and so do ballots. When the voter casts their ballot, the number of the ballot is recorded in a register along with the voter's unique identification number. This register is kept as a state secret and is not examined nor tied to individual ballots unless required by a court.

It might be useful to consider such a system here in the states... although since 49 states (save West Virginia) have ballot secrecy and/or privacy written into their state laws and/or constitution, the case for a more limited notion of ballot secrecy would have to be highly compelling.