Stanford University social science professor Jon A. Krosnick argues that the New Hampshire order of candidates on the Democratic presidential primary ballot injured Barack Obama. See this article. New Hampshire law requires a random drawing of a letter of the alphabet, for each election. For the 2008 presidential primary, the random letter was “z”. No candidate had a surname beginning with “z”. The law also required alphabetical order following the random sample letter, so in actual practice, the Democratic ballot listed candidates in alphabetical order, ranging from “a” to “y”. This put Hillary Clinton 4th from the top, but Barack Obama 4th from the bottom. The ballot had 21 Democratic presidential candidates. Thanks to Bill Van Allen for this.
Standard comment — the State MORONS can NOT have half the ballots in reverse alphabetical order ???
Way too difficult for the MORONS in governments to understand.
This is an excellent observation.
One of the ways that states have weakened political parties has been, using the excuse of a public interest in orderly elections, to tell parties how to arrange their primary ballots. This has been carried to absurd lengths. Years ago I was a candidate for San Francisco County Democratic Central Committee. This body, by state law, was elected at large on a bedsheet ballot, with candidates listed alphabetically. Come election day, not surprisingly, all the candidates elected were listed on the first page of the ballot. Dalys and Bordas and Diazes did very well, while Kelleys, Smiths and Thompsons all lost. The most interesting thing about this regulation is that it weakened party members’ ability to elect strong leadership of their choice while strengthening..no one. It was a purely destructive law, one of many from the Progressive movement in Western states.
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