Professor Barry Edwards has published this study which shows that when states list candidates on the ballot in alphabetical order, those whose surnames start with letters near the beginning of the alphabet are more likely to be elected. Thanks to Election Administration Reports for the link.
Ballot Access News
Edited By Richard Winger
This is certainly not new information. In Calif., as far back as 1980 sequencing of candidates was randomized. Bye-bye to “the power of the A”!
What if the difference is because voters can’t find the candidate whom they prefer because the information is presented in a confusing manner on the ballot?
Low literacy voters may give up looking for their candidate of choice. In effect, a non-alphabetized ballot may be a form of literacy test.
Some while back, I was trying to determine how members of the Irish Dail were distributed (it turns out that constituencies are based on population, but I didn’t know that at the time). I found an alphabetical listing of TD’s and was checking out which county they were from. There was a decided dearth of TD’s from western Ireland. While some of this is due to the concentration of the population around Dublin, it is not the only cause. It turns out that TD’s with Celtic patronyms (O’Leander and MacHine) are more likely to be from this area, and are found in the latter portion of the names.
This distribution might be due to the distribution of names among the overall population (eg less English influence), or that Fianna Fail in particular, and Fine Gael, to a lesser extent, are more based on nationalism than policy.
It’s true there are many adult U.S. residents who can’t read extensively, and I have known such people. But even they tend to know the alphabet, and are able to pick out surnames. Also most, if not all, states have voting equipment designed for blind people or people who cannot read. The equipment talks to the user. Finally, people who need help in the voting booth are permitted to bring someone in with them to help them. Also most states now have mail ballots for people who need them, and when a voter has a mail ballot at home it is easy to find someone to help.
How about the super-obvious —
half the ballots A to Z
half the ballots Z to A
Much too difficult for MORON judges to understand ???
If this is the case, would the same apply to other methods of ordering a ballot? Are the top choices almost always elected regardless of ordering method? I ask, because this could be a good study to use in efforts to change how states like Oklahoma order their ballots. Right now, the state orders ballots by party in a random order. However, Independents always show up last on the ballot because the law excludes them from the ordering process. Would this study work as evidence in support of including independents in that process?
I think you are missing my point.
There are two (or possibly three) reasons for the observed behavior.
(1) Voters know who they want to vote for, but have difficulty finding that candidate when the names are scrambled, and simply pick the name at the top of a list.
(2) Voters are clueless, and simply pick the first name on the ballot.
(3) There are unrecognized demographic factors.
It is conceivably a combination of (1) and (2). The congressional sample began in 1949, and the legislative sample in 1967, long before the adoption of assistive technology. Voters may believe that they don’t need personal assistance. A voter who is frustrated because they can’t find their preferred candidate due to confusing ballot presentation, might be too embarrassed to ask for help from an election judge. In some cases in Texas, assistants are used to ensure that voters vote the right way, rather than for who a voter would vote for themselves. Voters may choose to be a mail voter, specifically to maintain their own autonomy. That is they don’t want to have to depend on someone to drive them to the polls, rather than they want to make it convenient for their preferred assistant to be available.
There is considerable geographic bias in the two samples. Of the 19 states that used random ordering, 16 are west of the Mississippi. Of the 9 states that used alphabetical ordering throughout, 6 are east of the Mississippi. There may also be sampling biases due to the variation in size of legislatures and congressional delegations.
6 states switched methods during the period. Five of them showed a shift toward Z, only one towards A. But since for two of them, the shift was not statistically significant it was discounted. Among those who switched to alphabetic ordering, the only one that shifted toward A was Florida. But the switch was early in the period, and Florida has experienced extreme demographic change in the ensuing 44 years. Comparing 1967-1971 in Florida, vs. 1971-2015 in Florida may be more like comparing two different states.
If you asked a political scientist whether there had been any significant changes between 1967 and 2015, it is quite unlikely they would say, “No not really, oh yeah, we switched back to alphabetical ordering in 1971.”
The most A-shifted state relative to the US population was Louisiana, the state that for most of that period provided additional clues on their ballots. Despite having scrambled ballots, California ranked high in A-shifting. California has many minority groups with distinct surnames, and quite possibly different alphabetical distributions. This may produce different results.
The research assigns names to ethnicity based on national lists of surnames. But a legislator named Lee from California is likely Asian, while from South Carolina, is likely to be black.