These people don’t tell their spouses and families who they voted for

Earlier this week, while campaigning for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in suburban Detroit, former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney made her case for Harris to suburban Republican and independent women.

At one point, she assured them, no one — not your husband, not your family — will know who you voted for.

“If you’re really concerned, you can vote your conscience and not have to say a word to anybody,” Cheney said, sitting side by side with Harris. “Millions of Republicans are going to do that on November 5th.”

It’s true: whether you voted or not is a public record, but how Your vote in local, state, or national elections is confidential; there is no official way to search for how someone voted.

This election cycle is so heated and partisan, some say they are planning to do what Cheney suggested: hide who they are really voting for from their spouses and family members.

Of course, in the worst case scenario, there are people in controlling or abusive relationships who are very worried about how their spouse will react if they vote for candidate A instead of their preferred candidate B.

But most of the people we interviewed for this story said they voted conscientiously while keeping secrets — or in some cases, outright lying — just to avoid awkwardness or tension in mixed political marriages or families. dialogue.

That was the case for Avery, a 30-year-old Army veteran from East Florida, who voted for Harris instead of Trump this time. (Avery, like others in this article, asked that her first name be used only to protect her privacy.)

“As a veteran, I am outraged by the insurrection he incited on January 6,” she said. “And with [Harris] And Tim Walz, I think they’re respectable, smart people, and I agree with their policies. When I watch them speak, I am not embarrassed for our country.

However, she won’t let her husband or his Trump-supporting immigrant family know about her voting plans to avoid any unnecessary family drama.

“If my husband knew I voted for Harris, he would probably roll his eyes,” Ivery said. “Others will probably throw out some silly conspiracy theory and try to change my mind, though.”

Her advice to other like-minded people is similar to Cheney’s: Do what you think is best for you and your family, and be confident in the choices you make.

“No one has the right to tell you who to vote for, no matter their relationship to you,” Avery said. “If you are a woman with an abusive or controlling husband, do what you can to vote Vote for the candidate you want. No one needs to know who that person is.

Sulman Aziz Mirza also secretly voted for Harris, but his situation was very different.

“My wife is against Kamala because of the whole Palestinian genocide that’s going on, and she made that the only issue on which she’s voting,” he told the Huffington Post, before saying he understood where his wife was coming from.

“I would love to [Palestinian rights and the war in Gaza] Mirza, who lives in a suburb south of Washington, D.C., said “the opposition is not entirely pro-Palestinian, so Harris has my support,” though I would love to see some support from her for the PAL.

Mirza believed his wife would most likely not vote after all, and he knew his Muslim family and circle of friends were equally ambivalent.

“Most of our friends are Muslims and they only see dead Palestinians and blame it solely on Biden/Harris, and this has been going on for decades,” he said. “It’s a very complex issue but one that certainly generates debate when we’re together.”

Robbie, 34, from Los Angeles, said he has avoided the awkward “Wait, who are you going to vote for?” Because he lives in deep blue California, his conversations with his wife become more and more frequent.

“I’m pretty sure I’m going to vote for Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver, but if we’re in a swing state and [I] It felt like my vote mattered and I really didn’t know what I would do,” he told The Huffington Post.

Robbie sides with Harris on social issues, but he leans more toward Trump financially. His wife insisted on voting for Harris.

“I know that if I did vote for Trump, I wouldn’t condemn anyone for doing so, and if I told my wife that I voted for him, she would resent me,” he said.

Justin, a 29-year-old from the Pacific Northwest, is quietly voting for Harris “mainly because she’s not Trump.”

Justin considers himself an independent (although he tends to vote Democratic), and to keep the peace, he tells his conservative grandparents and parents that he is independent, or simply that he “tells it without voting.”

However, if his family starts yelling at the candidates he secretly votes for, he usually joins in. After all, he said, “most of the time we don’t have good candidates, so it’s easy to complain about any candidate.”

The only time Justin blatantly lied about his voting choice was to his left-leaning friends on the few occasions when he voted Republican. They’d be surprised to hear the news because Justin says he’s a bisexual, “gorgeous tree-hugging man who supports women’s reproductive rights and hates overfunding the military.” [and] Tend to vote Democratic.

“Typically, the way I vote is the same as [my friends]but the way they talk about people who vote Republican makes me feel bad, and they say outright that they’re not going to be friends with people who vote Republican,” he told The Huffington Post.

James, 23, from Southern Michigan, also hasn’t told his Republican family who he will vote for, especially his parents, who voted for Trump in the past two elections.

“We haven’t had direct conversations about it this year, but I think they think I’m going to vote for Trump, too,” he said. “They’ve said, ‘We need every vote for Trump,’ and I’m sure they’d be upset if they knew that wasn’t the case for me.”

If the topic were raised directly, James said he would lie and say he chose Trump simply to avoid conflict.

After the 2016 and 2020 election cycles — especially 2016 — there was a lot of post-election discussion about voters who were unwilling to admit they voted for Trump beforehand.

A post-2016 Columbia Business School study found that Trump won the majority of “secret” voters against Hillary Clinton. “Secret” Trump voters outnumbered those who secretly supported Hillary by two to one.

Robert C. Cahaly, a pollster and strategist at the conservative-leaning Trafalgar Group, believes Trump’s support may be underestimated again this time.

“This year we have measured significant hidden votes for Trump, but the reasoning has changed,” he said. “This time, it’s not out of shyness, but out of fear of being targeted based on their answers. They fear data collection, retaliation, or retaliation if their names end up on the list as a Trump supporter. Cancel.

In his therapy offices in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., Jonathan Alpert says he sees a lot of shy or public Trump voters who keep their votes to themselves because they don’t want to be judged .

“One patient told me that everyone in her cooking class thought she was a liberal and hated Trump,” Alpert told The Huffington Post. “In fact, she is not a liberal. , didn’t hate Trump either. She supported him, but stayed silent when the rest of the class ranted about Trump.

“I’ve heard a lot of similar stories over the past few months,” he said.

The psychotherapist didn’t hear any clients say they were secret Harris supporters, but then again, he worked in two very liberal inner cities.

Still, we may not have heard from many of Harris’ secret voters, said Sam Wang, a professor of neuroscience at Princeton University and director of the Election Innovation Lab. and research groups analyzing electoral systems.

Wang noted that this year’s gender gap is the largest it has ever been: A USA Today and Suffolk University survey released on Monday found that Trump leads Harris by 16 percentage points among men nationwide. Harris has an almost identical lead among female voters, who favor Democrats by 17 percent.

“The obvious reason for this disparity is reproductive rights, since the Dobbs case was a Supreme Court decision by a Republican-appointed judge, and most Republican lawmakers are open to a nationwide abortion ban,” Wang said. “

Online, many wondered whether there were more secret Harris voters married to MAGA partners than we thought. What does Mr. Wang think?

“Any household with a man and a woman is more likely than ever to have conflicting party preferences,” he said. “Liz Cheney is right that men and women are better off keeping their votes secret.”

As for whether secret voters — whether Trump or Harris — will make a difference on Nov. 5, “The election is looking pretty close right now and every vote can make a difference.”