ABSTRACT
100s chapter considers the connection between the act of voting and the requirements of secrecy or publicity surrounding that act. Throughout the book, we have been concerned not only with comparisons between different electoral systems, but also with using examples drawn from voting systems which do not necessarily have electing officeholders as their objective. For example, votes are taken to determine policy. In Chapter 4, we discussed the contrast between representative government and democracy, and we saw that the most obvious contrast between the two was the highly attenuated connection, in the former, between citizens' votes and policy determination. The differences between direct and indirect democracy will prove to be important in our consideration of the connection between democracy and secrecy, and thus in the more specific context of secrecy in electoral systems. In Chapter 3, we saw that whether the ballot is secret or not is a major, but often neglected, aspect of one of the three 'phases' of an electoral system, namely ballot structure.
