The Secret Ballot

This chapter examines the expansion of free speech to the largely mute act of voting in elections and to the protection of a person's affiliations and associations with others from public disclosure at the hands of the government. It does so through the recent Doe v. Reed case and a gay rights referendum in Washington State. It addresses the following questions: How should the freedom of speech be interpreted to protect such undeniably important acts as voting and joining with others—say, in a church or a charitable cause? Is it possible to read “freedom of speech” as protecting them without at the same time losing all pretense of restraint on the Supreme Court's power to interpret the Constitution? In addressing these larger questions, the chapter shows the parts of the First Amendment that were first pulled apart—speaker, speech, purpose—stitched back together in the form of constitutional doctrine. Is the resulting web of free speech doctrine and theory coherent or symmetrical, or is it just a tangled mess?