If you look on social media in the coming days, you will see many voters sharing selfies with their ballots, perhaps with the hashtag #IVotat.

But before you share your civic engagement with the world, think twice—that selfie might be illegal, depending on where you live in the United States.

Just ask Justin Timberlake. In 2016, the pop singer posted a photo on Instagram of himself voting in a polling booth with the caption: “Get out and VOTE!”

Timberlake wiped the post after being warned that his ballot selfie was against Tennessee law that prohibits taking pictures at polling places. Two years later, he encouraged his social media followers to vote by reminding them: “Remember: NO selfies at the voting booth.”

Some states allow selfies on the ballot under certain conditions. In Arizona, Texas, Tennessee and West Virginia, you can only take photos with postal ballots. In Florida, voters I can take a picture of the ballot inside the voting booth, but not during the tabulation of the ballot paper. In Utah, you can share a photo of your ballot, but this it is a misdemeanor if you take a photo of someone else.

In New York, you might get a threatening response on X, which is what happened to a 2022 voter who posted the selfie of his completed ballot on the platform. He wiped image after New York City Board of Elections answered: “Displaying a voted ballot to anyone is a misdemeanor in NYS (New York State). Please remove the pictures.”

And in some states, a ballot selfie is not only allowed, it’s encouraged. Alabama, California, Colorado, Hawaii and Nebraska, for example, all have laws that expressly allow voters to split their ballots, according to National Conference of State Legislatures. Marc Levine, then-California State Assemblyman who led the state’s pro-voting selfie push, described ballot selfies as “a magnificent display of civic participation.”

The wide range of places where states land by sharing these photos speaks to a conflict between two fundamental aspects of democracy: “free and fair elections versus free speech and political expression,” Jeff Hermes, deputy director of the Media Law Resource Center, said HuffPost.

Critics of ballot selfies say they can make it easier for bad actors to buy your vote or prove you voted the way they wanted.

At least 45 states they have constitutional provisions guaranteeing the right to vote by secret ballot. These laws date back to the 19th century, when vote-buying schemes and violent voter intimidation were rampant. Back then, public bribery for votes was normal; Landlords and factory owners bullied tenants and workers about how they should vote, and thugs called “strikers” could be hired to scare voters, historian Jill Lepore recounted in a 2008 report . New Yorker article to early paper voting in America.

Nowadays it is illegal for someone to pay you to vote for them. “States have banned the sharing of selfies or ballot photos as part of a broader ban on displaying marked ballots because they are trying to prevent voter fraud or vote buying,” Hermes said.

Texas, for example, prohibit photos within 100 feet of a polling place. Hermes said there have been some court decisions that say a polling place is “a space that the government opens to the public for very specific purposes, but it can control what happens there.” He noted, however, that it can be “problematic” when states end ELECTION and vote-buying problems in one statute because it “typically tries to restrict speech too much.”

Penalties in jurisdictions with strict selfie bans can range from being asked to put away your phone to hefty fines and prison terms. “There’s a lot of discretionary enforcement in this area,” Hermes said.

In Illinois, knowingly sharing or observing someone’s marked ballot it is a crime. The Chicago Board of Elections, however, told HuffPost that violations of Illinois’ selfie voting ban don’t often involve the police.

“If a voter is seen doing that, an election judge can tell them to stop, and that’s usually where it ends,” said Max Bever, the board’s director of public information. “Instead, poll workers are encouraging voters to take a photo with the ‘I Voted’ sticker outside the polling place as a way to show their pride.”

But sometimes states investigate and prosecute voters who knowingly take a selfie with their ballot. In North Carolina, the photo of a voted ballot is her own category of complaints that people can fill out when reporting a violation of election law.

Just in March, voter Susan Hogarth received a letter from the North Carolina State Board of Elections, threatening her with criminal prosecution for posting a selfie on X with the completed ballot in a voting booth. He was asked to “take down the post” because “photographing a ballot is prohibited by law and punishable as a Class 1 misdemeanor,” according to the letter, which was reviewed by HuffPost.

Rather than retract his post, Hogarth sued, arguing that the state’s selfie ban violates voters’ First Amendment rights.

“Susan did not postpone the polling place. She didn’t disrupt anyone’s vote at all. She was not doing this as part of a vote-buying scheme,” said Jeff Zeman, a lawyer for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the free-speech group that filed the lawsuit on Hogarth’s behalf. “She was just expressing her enthusiasm for the vote.”

“Banning selfies at the polls means North Carolina voters are losing the freedom to express themselves as they wish, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment,” Zeman continued. “Our concern here is that these statutes kill speech, that people won’t take selfies at the polls in the first place because they know they’re a crime.”

Hogarth’s case is still pending. Beyond North Carolina, FOC appraisal which are at least 13 other states that ban selfies at the polls.

Because the laws and enforcement of ballot selfies can vary so much, your best bet is to go to your local board of elections and ask if your ballot selfie idea will be OK.

Or you could just snap a picture of your “I Voted” sticker, as suggested by Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for Politics in New Jersey. He said it’s a way to show yourself “where you’re not going to break the law, even in a technical sense.”

But as Zeman noted, what makes a voting selfie special is what it can uniquely express beyond a sticker.

“Some people like Susan want to express their enthusiasm for voting and who they are voting for by posting selfies,” he said. “That shows the world who you actually voted for, and a ‘I Voted’ sticker can’t do that.”