As the American mid-term election results roll in, spare a thought for Andrew Langlois of New Hampshire, who is being investigated by the state’s attorney general’s office after voting for his own dead dog for senator in the Republican primary in September. At the time Langlois didn’t think much of the other candidates on offer, so he wrote in the name of his late lamented pet, Akira, as a protest.
Langlois is not being investigated because he voted for a dog, or because that dog was dead: you don’t have to be breathing to seek office in America. In 2012 a dead man was elected to the Texas state senate; another was voted city council president of Rochester, Minnesota. In the same year Charles Darwin came second in a battle for a congressional seat in Georgia, even though he was not a US citizen, or a resident of Georgia, and had not been alive since 1882 (he received more than 4,000 write-in votes in protest against an unopposed candidate who believed the Earth was 9,000 years old). In Missouri in 2000, the sitting US senator, John Ashcroft, lost his seat to a man who had died in a plane crash two weeks before the election. That makes Darwin’s distant second seem a bit pathetic by comparison.
Langlois’s mistake was that he took a picture of his ballot paper with Akira’s name written in, and posted the result on Facebook. In doing so he fell foul of a new state law making the “ballot selfie” a crime. Lots of states actually have old laws against taking photographs in polling places – in many cases you’re not even allowed to show your completed ballot to another human – but New Hampshire has updated its voting laws to prohibit “distributing or sharing the image via social media”. Violations are punishable by a $1,000 fine.
Vote-buying, 1880s style
In the Netherlands the ballot selfie is so popular it has its own word – stemfie. It’s lawful, as long as the picture is of your ballot and no one else’s.
The legality of the ballot selfie remains unclear in the UK. During this May’s local and European elections polling station staff were advised to tell voters not to take photos in the polling booth, but also not to try to confiscate any phones. Concerns in the UK are largely about protecting the secrecy of the ballot, whereas in New Hampshire legislators feared a return to the “rampant” electoral fraud of the 1880s, when voters were sometimes issued with pre-marked ballots to be submitted in exchange for money or booze.
Supporters of the law argued that the selfie could pave the way for a new era of vote-buying, even though nobody had ever heard of social media being used this way, and no one could cite a single example of vote-buying in New Hampshire since 1890.
Langlois is now bringing a civil rights action against the state. He and two other plaintiffs (both state representatives who took ballot selfies after voting for themselves) argue the law amounts to a constitutional violation of the right to free speech. If they’re successful, it’ll be the first time a blow for freedom has ever been struck by a dead dog. Actually I should check that; for all I know it could have happened loads of times.
My bid for high office
I am reminded that the first time I ever cast a ballot – exactly 30 years ago, as it happens, in Vermont, where I was at college – I voted for myself for the office of high bailiff of Addison County. Like Langlois, I was unimpressed by the only other option: the Republican candidate was running unopposed. So I wrote myself in as a protest.
Afterwards I canvassed friends for support – I suddenly fancied serving writs in my spare time – but exactly none of them voted for me. Who knows? If I’d been able to post a picture of my marked ballot on Twitter straight away, I might be living a very different life right now.
RIP, Akira.
