Uh-oh: Your Obama Vote Won't Count If You Post It On Instagram Or Whatever

 
 Hello, millennial children of the digital age! You probably think you're pretty "cool" if you take a picture of yourself voting for Obama and then post it on your favorite social media networking time-wasting porn sites, so your friends can see that you're a liberal chump like them. In this sense voting is like every other activity in your shallow, overshared life. But unlike the artfully filtered pictures of your homemade meals that you put on Instagram and all those nude selfies you stuck on MySpace in 2006 and then forgot about, those photos of your ballots are actually illegal in most states, and thus count in reverse, for Mitt Romney!

The Wall Street Journal' s All Things D somehow managed to beat Buzzfeed FWD to this tech/election overlap thingie, andexplains about why you shouldn't put pictures of your completed ballot online . This is mostly because we have "secret ballot" laws that make it illegal to take photos in polling places, which protects you from having a boss or some other person in authority over you demanding that you take a picture in a polling place, of your ballot, so they can fire you when you don't vote for Romney. Also you can't take pictures of your fellow voters, because that's creepy. Why do you want to be creepy? Putting up pictures of your ballots won't actually invalidate your vote, but one guy actually had his phone taken away for doing it, and for your average young person losing a precious smartphone is a million times worse than the thought of a Romney Administration, so be sure not to do this. [ WSJ ATD ]