Indiana bill would make early ballots traceable to voters

For more than a century, American elections have operated around a simple promise: who you voted for is a secret. But a bill moving through the Indiana legislature would undermine that promise — at least for people who vote early.

House Bill 1359 would let counties have early voters feed their completed ballots directly into a scanning machine instead of placing them in a sealed secrecy envelope. It would then allow those ballots to be scanned starting on the first day of early voting, rather than waiting until closer to Election Day.

On its own, that process isn’t unusual — it’s similar to how ballots are handled at in-person polling places on Election Day. But the bill also authorizes counties to generate a unique identifier connected to each voter during early voting, print that number on the voter’s ballot, and allow officials to retract a scanned ballot if its voter is later found ineligible. That combination weakens the traditional separation between a voter’s identity and the ballot they cast.

Election officials and voting rights advocates argue those changes touch one of the most fundamental protections in modern democracy.



https://www.votebeat.org/2026/02/23/indiana-legislature-election-bill-secret-ballot-early-voting/