PROVIDENCE — When you vote, should you also be thinking about whether to smile and say “cheese”?

Robert Kando, the executive director of the state Board of Elections, thinks not. Saying he wants to protect the secrecy of the ballot and prevent vote fraud, he has proposed banning the use of “surveillance equipment,” cameras and video recorders, along with cell phones, because they can take pictures, too, from the state’s polling places during voting hours.

The rules would also ban campaign buttons and any other “communication” intended to influence the election outcome from inside the polling place and within 50 feet of its entrance.

Groups with opinions on the issue agree on the need to protect the secrecy of the ballot, a fundamental principle of American democracy. But after that, there is a clash of opinions, from critical to supportive, making a complicated disagreement likely when the board takes up the proposals Feb. 7.

The photography ban is drawing fire from journalists and raising questions among others, some of whom suggest that the board is considering a flawed solution to a nonexistent problem.

Linda Lotridge Levin, chairwoman of the University of Rhode Island journalism department and secretary of the Rhode Island Press Association, said she checked the Web and quickly found a photo of a woman casting her vote — in Moscow. If that’s permissible in Russia and not in Rhode Island, she said, “This is pretty repressive.”

Joseph Abouzeid, news director at WPRI-TV (Channel 12), called the proposed regulations “unnecessary and arguably unconstitutional.”

“Part of what we do is be a watchdog for the public,” he said. “Locking the doors to the media is in effect locking out the public.”

The Journal also opposes banning photographers.

That would be a draconian solution to a problem that apparently doesn’t exist, said Howard A. Merten, a lawyer representing the newspaper on First Amendment issues. Merten said he could find no instance of the publication of a picture disclosing a person’s vote.

On the other hand, he said, the cost would be the disappearance of an invaluable historical record of “the most fundamental thing that American citizens do.”

“It serves a hugely important role” in documenting democracy, Merten said; without it, there would have been no photographs of the first women voting or the first African-Americans voting in the South.

“Why on earth would you want to hide that process?”

Journalists have generally been allowed to take photographs or shoot film in Rhode Island polling places.

Kando said the idea of banning photography came to him when he saw a newspaper photograph of a voter holding his ballot. It occurred to him that the photographer “could have blown up the picture enough to be able to read the ballot.”

“The ballot may not be as secret as we’d like,” he concluded.

In the current election system, voters mark their ballots and then feed them into an optical scanner that records the votes and stores the ballots. While carrying the ballots from the voting booth to the machine, they are supposed to put them in a cardboard sleeve, concealing whom they voted for.

But Kando said some voters don’t use the sleeve or don’t completely hide their ballot. He thinks that could let a photographer subvert the secrecy of the voter’s choice.

Kando said he’s also worried that photography could facilitate vote-buying. If a corrupt politician wants to buy a vote, he reasons, he also wants to know that he’s getting his money’s worth. Kando said that if a voter could photograph his ballot, he could take the image with him to prove that he deserved the payoff.

Kando said he hasn’t researched the issue, and said he could point to no instances of photography either revealing votes or assisting vote-buying. But he said, “Historically, people have been trying to buy the votes of other people.”

The Rhode Island affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union wants secrecy of the ballot protected, but its executive director, Steven Brown, said that limitations on picture-taking should be written narrowly, to achieve only that goal.

There’s good reason to take pictures inside polling places, Brown said: “The ability to record images might provide the best evidence of infractions of election laws.”

Officials who run Rhode Island’s elections differ on whether there are problems for the proposed rules to remedy.

Lori aRusso, chief clerk to the Johnston Board of Canvassers, said the board had to ban the use of cell phones inside the polls last year.

Campaign workers, she said, were on the phone reporting the names of people who had voted back to their organizations. At the same time, her poll workers were calling voters’ names out to be checked off. The result, she said, was confusion that disrupted the voting.

Elizabeth D’Agostino, who chairs the Johnston canvassers, said that photographers have deterred Johnston voters. “A number of them just walk out — they won’t vote,” she said.

She said the approach some states use, letting only news photographers take pictures, won’t work in Johnston because campaign workers will complain. “If I allow the press in there, they’ll ask why they can’t do the same,” she said.

On the other hand, Laurence K. Flynn, chairman of the Providence Board of Canvassers, has been involved in running elections in the city for 30 years and said the problems other officials see simply haven’t come up.

“There’s never been a problem” with picture-taking, Flynn said. Local news organizations take their pictures from a distance, he said. “I could see his concern there,” Flynn saidto Kando’s worries about ballot privacy, but he added, “I’ve never had that be a problem.” He said he finds local news organizations cooperative. National ones contact him ahead of time to check on what’s expected of them, he said.

Flynn said also he hasn’t heard of problems involving cell phones.

Election officials say that if phones or anything else disrupts voting, they’d step in. State law already directs them to “cause to be removed or arrested” any person who “disturbs the conduct of the voting.”

Doug Lewis, executive director of the National Association of Election Officials, said most states let news organizations take pictures “as long as it’s not over their [voters’] shoulders while they’re voting.” He said election officials generally like having pictures of voting appearing in the media because they encourage people to vote.

Elsewhere, some states limit photography at polling places, with the bans ranging from limited to total. For example:

•Indiana lets media representatives into the polls, but says they can’t photograph voters if the voters object, and can’t take pictures that show how a voter voted.

•Florida’s Division of Elections says, “No photography is allowed in the polling room.” The agency also says that reporters and other “members of the media” can go into the polling room only to vote.

•California bans photographing voters within 100 feet of a polling place, but only if the intent is to discourage them from voting.

•Delaware election officials are required to make sure that no camera “is in a position that would permit anyone to view the ballot.”

Members of the Board of Elections here said they are not close to a decision on whether to adopt the proposed regulations.

“It’s far from being a done deal,” said Thomas Iannitti, chairman of the board. “It’s strictly a proposal. It has to be put out on the table for discussion.”

blandis@projo.com