Such developments may be dismissed as being of merely historical interest. And indeed, except for Brennan and Pettit’s (1990) work, there is little contemporary debate about the justifiability of the secret ballot. Rather, the discussion has shifted its focus to parliamentary debate and to administrative activity, such as FoIs. Still, there are at least three lessons to be learnt from older debates about the ballot, over and above the fact that vote secrecy is not unambiguously costless. First, already at that time, there were attempts at envisaging simultaneously the questions of vote secrecy in the case of electors and in the case of representatives.[36] The interesting fact is that we do not today have a clear theory telling us why we should have secret ballots for electors and open votes in plenary parliamentary sessions. Simply referring to the fact that representatives are accountable to their electors (vertical accountability) in a sense in which electors are not to their fellow citizens (horizontal accountability) is insufficient in itself. Ceteris paribus, the importance of horizontal accountability, insofar as it emphasizes the need to justify our decisions to those who may endure their consequences, could suffice to justify openness. Moreover, it is probably also insufficient to claim that the fact that representatives may lose their job as a result of electoral discontent is not as problematic as the fact that electors could lose their job if their employer were to know for whom they voted. This does not mean that differences are absent. Ceteris paribus, a representative has more power than a citizen, for example.[37] What we need to ask ourselves is whether this is sufficient to justify treating the two categories so differently with regard to vote publicity.