Activist, Learner

Understanding Disparity in Voting Ballot Design

Posted by Monica O'Brien on February 6, 2008 at 4:35 am.

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You got up early and headed to the polls, ready to cast your vote.  You voted for your presidential candidate - then what?  Did you stare blankly at the blur of names and positions that followed?

I did.  It was hard enough for me to choose a presidential candidate; I hadn’t even thought about Chicago politics.  Oops.

It was a sinking feeling; like I was taking a test over 5 chapters when I had only read the first paragraph.  An urge to mark “guilt votes” came over me.  Guilt votes - when you feel you should be voting because you should have studied the issues and made an informed choice.

Except I hadn’t studied the issues.  At that point, I had three options for choosing the right candidates for each office:

  • Name Recognition - Choose a person whose name I had heard the most.  Seeing as I don’t watch TV regularly, that would be the candidate who positioned campaign workers outside the polling station to hand out last-minute pamphlets.
  • Name Preference - Choose a person based on how their name sounds.  People are more attracted to candidates with names they can pronounce, and one can often deduce race by a name.  For further reading, Freakonomics has an entire chapter on names (regular readers will learn I’m obsessed with this book and refer to it often).
  • Order Preference - Choose a person based on where their name is in the list. On surveys, people subconsciously prefer “firsts;” in this case, the first name on the ballot list is more likely to get apathetic or swing votes than any of the others.

What does this tell us?  That guilty voting is arguably the worst way to approach an election - even worse than not voting at all.  Any of these methods of choosing a candidate for office are unethical and do more harm than good.  These methods favor candidates who can afford more campaign advertising and penalize minority candidates and independent candidates more likely to be listed at the bottom of their ballot.

I left the rest of the ballot blank.

The right to vote is ours, but it’s also our responsibility to know when not to vote.

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  • As more and more millennials start rocking the vote, it's important for us to realize that an uninformed vote doesn't too much more good than no vote at all. I always make a point only to vote on the issues and races that I actually knew about before I walked into the voting booth, which is tough, but important.

    That said, most people end up voting with their gut, so young voters shouldn't shy away from voting just because they're not entrenched in politics or campaigns. There are a lot of sources for unbiased information about issues and candidates. So making an informed decision doesn't have to mean hours spent debating and researching and wavering. Of course, the more you know about the issues and the candidates the better, but I think our generation needs to empower themselves by at least just taking a few minutes before they head to the polls to read up on things.
  • Tiffany,

    Great point. In my situation, I didn't know anything about the candidates or offices, so any votes I cast would have been purely guesses.

    I agree you don't have to be entrenched in politics to cast your vote. I cast my vote for president in part from taking multiple online tests. That narrowed my choices - I then went to my top candidates websites and read a bit about their platforms. Most of us just don't have the time to devote to researching every candidate in depth. The web has made it much easier to get information about candidates, but now we have to worry about getting accurate information.

    Thanks for the comment!
  • Great point that getting accurate and valid information is key and sometimes difficult. In fact, it's interesting because we're seeing that the web is actually helping balance news coverage on political races more and empowering candidates who would in the past not have stood much of a chance at getting their message out.

    Since the republican party still has more than two candidates in the running, it's a good example of how this is working right now. Take, for example, the Ron Paul / Facebook phenomenon - most users who say they're republican on Facebook overwhelmingly support Paul, who's otherwise touted as a C-list candidate, but who's still in the race. (In fact, when I was looking over Facebook's stats last night, it looked like just as many users supported Paul as did Obama, which was suprising to me). And that's in large part because they've been able to get information on him in alternate ways (such as his Facebook profile) than the traditional media. Even though traditional media quit reporting on him early in the primaries.

    Regardless of whether or not you think Paul's a good candidate, you have to admit, the continued support of such a wildcard type candidate (especially by young voters) is a phenomenon we haven't seen in any other election to such an extent, so I think it's an interesting time regarding the issue of information, the web, and politics.
  • Yeah, there is some good in the internet. Web 2.0 is definitely changing the way political campaigns are run - the same way Web 2.0 is changing the way we do business and the way we nurture relationships.

    The only thing that bothers me about facebook campaigns for the presidential election is that they're almost too fad-ish. A lot of people will vote for who their friends vote for, the same way they play the games their friends play and join the causes their friends join. There's a virality to it, but I would love if people thought about things for themselves.

    I see this most with Obama. Many people support him for his platform and his persona, which I respect. But many others hear from their friends that "Obama is for the young people" and vote just on that. It's pathetic. NYT wrote an article about how Obama is a Mac and Hilary is a PC - this logic is crazy to me. The presidential election should not come down to who is the "hippest." I'm happy to hear from people who support Obama for legitimate reasons, which is why I highlighted some of the articles above.

    Something else I just thought of - the internet is also good for the presidential campaign because it takes away power from traditional media. We can interact with the candidates through profiles and websites rather than getting all of our information through a traditional media filter, which is often slanted.

    Thanks again for your thoughts Tiffany - they've built quite a bit on the original post.
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