A worker may support a different representative from the one their supervisor favors. A member may oppose a popular founder's proposal while wanting to remain on good terms. Anonymous ballots create room for those choices by preventing the vote from becoming a public declaration of loyalty.
Ballot secrecy depends on practical arrangements: private marking, indistinguishable ballots, and counting that does not connect choices to identities. Calling a survey anonymous is insufficient if the administrator can easily reconstruct who selected which answer.
Privacy changes the pressure
A small association could issue identical paper ballots, provide a private space to complete them, and mix them before counting. It would still need to verify eligibility and prevent duplicate votes without attaching names to choices.
The smallest groups present a special difficulty: even an aggregate result can reveal someone's vote when everybody else's position is known. Remote voting can create another problem if a participant completes a ballot while someone else watches. Digital systems introduce questions about account logs and administrator access.
Secrecy protects individual choice, while transparent counting protects confidence in the result. Those are different needs and can coexist. A public show of hands makes counting simple but leaves dissent visible; an anonymous ballot deliberately exchanges that visibility for more private judgment.