Federal Court Says Ballot Selfie Ban Is Like Burning Down the House to Roast a Pig
https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/federal-court-says-ballot-selfie-ban-burning-down-house-roast-pig
In a victory for the First Amendment, a federal appeals court unanimously struck down New Hampshire’s law banning “ballot selfies.”...
The law, which went into effect in September 2014, banned a person from displaying a photograph of a completed ballot, including on the internet through social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Engaging in this form of political speech was a violation-level offense punishable by a fine of up to $1,000.
The New Hampshire Legislature’s idea was to prevent illegal vote buying and voter coercion. But rather than limiting the law’s reach to online displays of marked ballots linked to these illegal schemes, the law banned innocent displays on social media as well — a form of speech which is almost always political in nature....
One of the other people we represented was Andrew Langlois. He was frustrated with the candidate choices during the 2014 primaries, so he wrote in the name of his dog, Akira, who had recently passed away. He also took a picture of the ballot with his phone, and later posted it on Facebook. A few weeks later, he got a call from the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office, which told him that he was under investigation for breaking the ballot selfie law.
