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No harm in random ballot

It’s a scenario I’m sure many civic voters have found themselves in: You get behind that oh-so-secretive piece of cardboard and start connecting lines to vote for your favourite council or school board hopefuls, only to figure out that with two votes

It’s a scenario I’m sure many civic voters have found themselves in: You get behind that oh-so-secretive piece of cardboard and start connecting lines to vote for your favourite council or school board hopefuls, only to figure out that with two votes left you still haven’t supported three preferred candidates. It seems you’ve been too generous at the top of the ballot which is proving costly for those near the bottom.

Exactly how frequently this takes place, and what impact it has on the election results, has been debate fodder for years, but one councillor in Vancouver believes it’s enough of an issue that she’s calling on her colleagues to modify the ballot for this fall’s election by dumping an alphabetical listing of candidates in favour of a random draw.

In the last four Vancouver elections, 19 of the 40 successful candidates for council have names beginning with one of the first four letters of the alphabet, so you can see why Andrea Reimer, who is not seeking re-election, is concerned about a potentially unfair advantage. A random draw would eliminate that concern, so I don’t see the harm in structuring ballots that way, but I wonder whether the recent experience in Vancouver is more of an anomaly than any kind of trend.

It’s hard to find any evidence of a top of the ballot bias in Delta where there have been 14 unsuccessful candidates for council in the last two elections, seven of which had surnames beginning with one of the first three letters of the alphabet. In the 20-candidate school board race back in 2011, none of the first four names were successful, but the last two on the crowded ballot did get elected.

Having said that, I remember a school board election more than a decade ago when a candidate filed nomination papers, but was absent throughout the campaign, leaving voters with no idea who she was or what she stood for. She didn’t get elected, but I recall being surprised at the number of votes she received, which was likely a result of being at the top of the ballot.

It’s unlikely that alphabetizing is affecting election outcomes to any great extent or with any regularity, but introducing a random ballot would be a simple way to ensure there’s no chance it has an impact.