one could film one’s whole life for several years before going into politics in order to prove virtue, quick-wittedness, and a lack of any ill-intent. These would seem to be desirable properties of leaders of countries
Somehow this idea horrifies me. This would select for leaders who are absolute normies, so that nothing they ever do is controversial in any way... which seems almost impossible considering all the things that are controversial or could be described as controversial if the journalist tries hard enough... so the winners would be absolutely bland people. (Or psychopaths with perfect self-control, if such thing is possible.)
Furthermore, most people would not be willing to pay such high price, which would select for people believing -- many years in advance -- that it is realistic for them to become presidents, so the price is worth paying. What kind of people are those? Either insanely overconfident ones, or people from highly privileged backgrounds. In some sense, this doesn't make the situation much worse than we have today (I think most American presidents were one big family, even if they had different surnames), but in some sense it would make it official.
Also, there are ways to destroy your competitors if they use such strategy. (And this option is only available to well-connected candidates, because they cannot organize the attack themselves; they must have a supporter organize it for them, while keeping them plausibly in the dark.) For example, there are questions that allow no good answer (each answer is either obvious false or extremely unacceptable to some part of society), so you just need someone to follow your competitor and bother them with that type of question. Or just keep asking them to donate money to heartbreaking causes, until they run out of money. Possibly many other options.
To summarize: a binary property P is either discernable (can't keep your status private) or not (can't prove your status).
the paucity of scenarios where such a proof would be desired (either due to a lack of importance of such character, or a lack of relevant doubt),
(or by differing opinion of what counts as desirable character!)
If Alice can sacrifice her privacy to prove her loyalty, she'll be force to do so to avoid losing to Bob - who already sacrificed his privacy to prove his loyalty and not lose to Alice. They both sacrificed their privacy to get an advantage over each other, and ended up without any relative advantage gained. Moloch wins.
At least in the US, the Free Speech Clause protects your right to photograph your own ballot, though local election officials are often unaware of this. Rideout v. Gardner, 838 F.3d 65 (1st Cir. 2016).
At least as of right now, that case only applies in New Hampshire, and I wouldn't be surprised if other courts found differently, or if an even slightly different wording or legislative reasoning for a similar law would have been upheld. So no, in much of the country it still is not legal to photograph your ballot, no matter that future court cases might rule the laws prohibiting it to be unconstitutional.
Also, this is one of those cases where the reasoning just feels bizarre to this non-lawyer. "Vote buying used to be rampant, so you banned showing people your ballot, and now you have no evidence of vote buying in the century since the ban was implemented, and only very indirect and weak recent evidence of attempts to buy votes, so you can't prove there's still a compelling government interest in restricting this form of political speech." AKA you had a compelling interest, succeeded in eliminating the problem, and therefore no longer have one. It's like saying you're only allowed to lock your door while there's a burglar inside, and have to unlock it once they leave.
That case is from the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, a federal appellate court. It is binding precedent not only in New Hampshire, but also in Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Puerto Rico. And it is the only federal appellate court to have ruled on the issue, which means it is still the most definitive interpretation of the law that there is for the entire country. The ruling is not based on details of statutory wording or legislative intent, so your suggestion that other courts might rule differently based on those things is completely baseless.
And it does seem very nature to this retired free speech lawyer. In any free speech case, the government has the burden of showing (1) that there is a significant governmental interest at stake, and (2) that the statute is narrowly tailored to that interest. The government has to present evidence for these two things, and they couldn't. As the court notes, the constitution "is not satisfied by the assertion of abstract interests". The country was a very different place a century ago, some states do allow you to photograph a ballot, and the state was not able to point to a single instance of a person photographing a ballot as part of a vote buying scheme. That seems like a good reason to think that it isn't actually a problem. And even if it were, the court points to two problems with narrow tailoring. One, that the statute prohibits a lot of highly protected political speech, such as the original posts hypothetical. Two, vote buying is already illegal, and there is no reason to think that statutes prohibiting vote buying are inadequate.
Note that nothing in that analysis is particular to the New Hampshire statute, it applies equally well to any statute that prohibits people from taking pictures of their ballots. Again, this is a federal appellate court, and the only one to have addressed this issue, so it is the strongest law there is throughout the entire country.
Below, I outline some musings I’ve produced while thinking about the private cryptocurrency Monero. I make no pretense to originality, cleverness, or exhaustiveness in covering considerations.
There are (at least) two distinct types of privacy. For instance, suppose you have an item in your house that you want nobody to see, even an intruder. One way you could handle this would be to buy a large black safe and hide the items in the safe, locked with a key that only you possess, and leave the safe on your desk. The other way would be to build a similar safe into a wall, and put a framed portrait in front of the safe. In the first case, an intruder can tell that they can’t open the black safe, but they know that you have something that you wish to keep hidden. In the second case, unless the intruder is perceptive enough to look behind the portrait, they will not even be able to tell that you have anything to hide. One could imagine an even better-concealed safe that would take painstaking effort to find - for the sake of this post, please imagine that it is very difficult to imagine that there might be anything on the wall behind a portrait.
You might prefer to own the second type of safe rather than the first, because the very fact that you possess something that you do not want others to see conveys almost as much as the sight of the item that you want to conceal. For instance, if you own something that proves that you violate certain social norms, the reason that you want to conceal it is to make others think that you actually abide by social norms - but if people only conceal things that do not abide by social norms, the fact that you are concealing something demonstrates that you do not, the very fact that you wanted others to remain ignorant of!
The hidden safe has another interesting property. If hidden safes exist, and it would be possible for you to install one in your home without others finding out, then it becomes extremely difficult for you to prove to others that you do not own a hidden safe. You could bring others inside your house, but in order to prove that you do not own a hidden safe you would have to take them thru a detailed enough level of search where they could find the hidden safe if it existed, which by hypothesis is no simple matter. Furthermore, in conducting such a search you would not be able to avoid parts of your walls that have embarrassing photographs of you as a child, while if you wanted to prove that you didn’t own a large black safe, you could cover up those photographs without any detriment.
This second property sometimes holds by design. For instance, take the case of the secret ballot. In many jurisdictions, it is not just possible to fill out a ballot in a booth where nobody else can see what you are doing, it is mandatory, and illegal to e.g. take photographs of your ballot to show others. This is precisely so that you cannot prove to others how you voted, so that votes cannot be bought or coerced.
The result of the second property is that it makes certain types of ‘proofs of character’ impossible. Consider the following scenarios:
If elections are run by secret ballots, then 1 is impossible. Regarding 2, if it is possible to have unrecorded conversations with others without special software, then I can’t prove that I have never had an untowards discussion with an interviewee. Furthermore, there is a cryptocurrency called Monero that has the property that nobody can tell who anybody is transacting with or how much they are transacting for (similarly to how cash works, and differently to how most blockchains work). There is currently a project called Kovri which aims to make it so that someone can access the Monero network without this fact becoming known by e.g. one’s internet service provider. As such, if Kovri were successful, as long as one could conceal a piece of paper containing one’s private keys, it would be a trivial matter to make a Monero transaction using Kovri and then delete the software used to do so from one’s computer, making it impossible to find out that the transaction ever took place or indeed that one ever used Monero without difficult forensic techniques. This means that I would be unable to prove that I have not received money from an interviewee without submitting to arduous and invasive scrutiny.
I regard it as somewhat unfortunate that this second type of privacy leads to the impossibility of proofs of character. An abating factor is that as far as I can tell, people very rarely seem to want to prove their character even when this is possible. For instance, one could film one’s whole life for several years before going into politics in order to prove virtue, quick-wittedness, and a lack of any ill-intent. These would seem to be desirable properties of leaders of countries, and yet I am unaware of any serious candidate doing such a thing. Perhaps a counterexample is the common custom of US presidential candidates to release their tax information before presidential elections, but this is hardly exhaustive, and might be rendered obsolete by the refusal of a recent presidential candidate to do so. My guess is that the lack of such proofs is caused by a combination of the poor character of such candidates relative to an ideal candidate, the paucity of scenarios where such a proof would be desired (either due to a lack of importance of such character, or a lack of relevant doubt), and a desire to not prove that one is extremely unusual.