Ballot selfies—taking a selfie with your voting ballot—aren’t legal everywhere, and may be punishable with prison time, so here’s everything you need to know before snapping a photo in the voting booth.
The Associated Press has put out a break down of ballot selfie laws in each state because “Can I take a ballot selfie?” is the next most important question to “Who am I going to vote for?” (Which by now you should probably have decided considering there’s less than two weeks until election day.)
Laws regarding ballot selfies or photos of voting ballots vary state to state and include variables like whether mail-in ballots can be legally photographed while ballots in a voting booth can’t be photographed. To see how specific laws can get, take a look at Texas, which, as the APwrites, “Bars photography within 100 feet of polling stations, so selfies are not allowed.” In Illinois, taking a ballot selfie could be punishable by law with one to three years in prison. According to the AP, New Jersey has legislation in the works to allow people to take photos of their ballots in the voting booth and post them on social media.
Reasons listed for not allowing ballot selfies include not wanting to sway voters (with a filled out ballot), not wanting to disrupt the electoral process at your local polling place, and protecting a voter’s privacy.
That being said here’s the states where ballot selfies are allowed: Connecticut, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wyoming.
And here’s the states where ballot selfies are illegal: Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Wisconsin.
All other states have mixed/unclear laws about ballot selfies, the AP reported.
