Fascinating research: Why The First Name On The Ballot Often Wins : NPR
And this is why we should not make voting by all, regardless of how engaged they are with the process, a virtue.
If people don’t know what’s going on, they should be encouraged to NOT vote. Voting isn’t just a right it’s a civic duty. Not learning about who is running for various offices is akin to sleeping while on jury duty.
This effect is pretty well-known: in Australia, it’s known as the donkey vote.
The study dealt specifically with “lower-profile choices … think school board seats, judges, agriculture commissioners.” In some of the states, voters are faced with a bewildering number of choices to make.
I, for one, find the large quantity of elective positions contrary to representative democracy. Most voters are faced with six or more general legislative positions they must vote for — can’t these legislators pick the agricultural commissioners? How lengthy are the ballots in other democracies?
The simple fix for this is to randomize order on the ballot, such that every candidate is first on an equal number of ballots.
If it’s truly random, someone might be at the top of 75% of the ballots. Better idea is to just rotate the names across the ballots, which I believe it what’s already commonly done. I remember a brief teapot tempest in 2012 when someone Tweeted a photo of a ballot with Romney’s name on top and Obama’s on the bottom with three or four minor candidates in between – real reason was just that Obama & Romney’s names were #1 & #2 (as the major party candidates) and it hit the point in rotation where Romney’s name cycled and Obama hadn’t.
Also, remove party affiliation.
I don’t agree with that – some ballots have a dozen names or more, and few can remember so many. Party affiliation contains relevant information for voters.
Yes. The less information the people have the better!
As noted this is a well known problem with a well known fix.
Voters should be required to know who is who before voting. Party affiliation encourages ignorant voting.
However, this would be extremely unlikely in any race where more than, say, 100 people were voting (to use a generous value of “extreme”).
However, what if people vote for the top-most candidate on the ballot that they already know? In the situation where you’re rotating Obama-Romney-Smith-Jones, then Obama will be higher than Romney 75% of the time, even though they are at the very top the same percentage.
But in Parliamentary Democracies you vote for the party. The party candidate is way less relevant.
Not everyone has the time or inclination to memorize a bunch of names. Party affiliation really is important information for many voters.
Restricting voting to only those people with lots of time and resources to study up is just another class-based restriction – wealthy and comfortable people tend to have more access to information and more time to learn it. People without such time and resources should have just as much right to vote as those with.
That doesn’t appear to be the case. In fact, the problem mainly seems to exist in lower level races (county commissioners, school boards, etc) where the average voter doesn’t know ANY of the names.
I’d argue that the practice of rotating names is probably unnecessary in presidential races but still good practice if only for perception’s sake.
People without the time to learn about candidates usually don’t know anything about the parties either. They just know who they are supposed to vote for based on their identity.
I strongly disagree.
Uh huh. Now you’re going to make me find you a video of Democratic voters being asked if they supported a list of Democratic initiatives that all happened to be Republican initiatives. Most people don’t know squat about what the parties believe. Most people do know what “side” they are supposed to be on and they may know about a couple of key issues that matter to them, like guns and abortion. And their views on what the parties actually believe on either of those issues will also usually be wrong.
In a world where most people, educated or not, don’t bother to keep up, we should not be encouraging voting. We should be encouraging people to learn things, and then they’ll vote without being prompted.
We live in a country today where which party gets elected in 2060 has less to do with their positions on the issues or the qualifications of their officeholders, and more to do with whether Latino voters see themselves as Latino or white. That’s not a healthy state of affairs, but it’s the state of affairs we’ve encouraged by putting moral pressure on people to vote who have no interest.
Which would prove absolutely nothing in relation to this discussion.
I’ll agree on encouraging education, but encouraging voting goes hand in hand with that. Those supposedly more informed voters are no more likely to vote for good candidates and good policy than those supposedly less informed voters, in my experience. A voter who spends months learning from freerepublic.com, Hannity’s radio show, and Fox News, is probably a lot less informed than someone who listens to NPR for 5 minutes a day and passes by a food court that plays CNN at lunch time.
I strongly disagree on both of these points. If there’s any link between identity and voting, it absolutely has not been caused by those encouraging people to vote, but rather by those encouraging people not to vote, as well as actually bigoted and discriminatory policy and advocacy. There really are good reasons why the vast majority of black people support the Democratic party and see Republicans as opposing their interests.
there are good reasons why every group supports a particular party. Although the reasons aren’t good enough to endorse balkanization. Take the party affiliations off the ballot and thought becomes a requirement.
If your goal is to make voting harder in order to keep the “wrong people” away, you might as well be intellectually honest about it and bring back the literacy test.
Political parties exist for a reason: to unite constituents under a broadly consistent philosophy of government. Party affiliation is completely relevant to the voting process.