Interesting article in the New York Times — In the Voting Booth, Bias Starts at the Top. Stanford University researcher Jon A. Krosnick says:
Candidates listed first on the ballot get about two percentage points more votes on average than they would have if they had been listed later (flipping a 49 to 51 defeat into a 51 to 49 victory). In fact, in about half the races I have studied, the advantage of first place is even bigger — certainly big enough to win some elections these days.
He figures that people vote for the first name when they don’t know much about the candidates, or perhaps just want to get out of the voting booth faster.
With the new “Easy Slate” voting machines in our area, I expect this phenomenon will become more powerful. When I voted the other day, I noticed that after you enter your vote in a race, you are automatically moved to the first name on the list for the next race. You need to turn the dial to get to any other candidates. That makes it much easier to select the first name on the list…
According to the article, in partisan races Tennessee always lists the Democrat first, which presumably gives Democrats an automatic advantage. In nonpartisan races such as the Oak Ridge city elections, candidates always are in alphabetical order, which presumably will give an automatic advantage to candidates at the head of the alphabet.
The Times op-ed contributor thinks this should change:
Thankfully, the question of bias and name placement on ballots is finally beginning to get the attention it deserves. In August, the Supreme Court of New Hampshire declared unconstitutional the state’s procedure for listing first the names of candidates whose party had received the most votes in the preceding state general election.
Other states should solve this problem — particularly because an effective technique for name placement exists.
Ohio uses a system that is the model of fairness and accountability. Candidate names are rotated from precinct to precinct, so every candidate is listed first an equal number of times, and observers can inspect ballots on Election Day to be sure the rotation was done properly. Idaho, North Dakota, Wyoming and a few other states use versions of this system.
That’s not to say that Ohio executes this system perfectly. For example, in 2004, with the permission of Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican, many Ohio counties ignored the rotation law and listed John Kerry last twice as often as the law allowed. And also with Mr. Blackwell’s approval, Mahoning County’s touch-screen voting machines supposedly rotated candidate name order from voter to voter.
His recommendation is “We should acknowledge the wisdom of the New Hampshire Supreme Court and adopt the rotating name-ordering procedures throughout the country.” Makes sense to me! With electronic voting machines, I wonder if it would be feasible to rotate the names on the list in an individual voting machine, so different voters see a different version of the list. Unfortunately, I fear that the additional programming required to do that also would increase the chance of error or tampering in the voting process….
