Every time I hear about voter fraud and election irregularities, I realize that the problem could easily be solved by doing away with the secret ballot. If we could simply match every voter identification card with each ballot and publish the results, every vote could be accounted for. Further, anyone could go on-line to see if their vote was counted.

I usually vote by absentee ballot and I always wonder whether my ballot was mysteriously lost in the mail or somehow didn’t get counted. It would be great if I could simply go on-line and see that I voted.

We publish the names of registered voters and which political party they registered under, so I have always wondered why the ballot must be secret by law. The majority of Republicans vote Republican; Democrats vote for Democrats; and so on. Therefore, given a person’s political party, age, sex, income, profession, and religious beliefs, pollsters can determine who you will vote for within a 90 percent degree of accuracy. If all of this is published, why then do we have a “secret” ballot?

Now some will point to intimidation, discrimination and a hundred other reasons why their vote needs to be private. We can accomplish the same thing, however, without disclosing a voter’s identity publicly.

The answer is simple: encryption.

In the same way that people feel safe to let retailers use computers to scan their credit cards, every voter identification card could be assigned a PIN and then voters could use their number on the internet to see how they voted and thereby police the polling officials. No one could see how you voted until the PIN was entered into the system. That way the ballot would remain “secret,” but people could see that their vote was counted.

Of course, if we do that, some will falsely claim they voted for another candidate or will discover they made a mistake, but once scanned, ballots must remain irretrievably fixed. There can be no “do-overs.” Even though there will always be some who will abuse the PIN system to “cry wolf,” we would still be able to see which polling places exhibit the greatest irregularities. Since voter fraud is a federal felony, this tracking system with encryption would effectively end voter fraud and help to fix irregularities due to human error.