ELECTORAL politics are all about getting people's attention, if only for a fleeting moment.
Just like the marketing for laundry soap or athletic shoes, a quick, almost subliminal message is far more efficient than any description of policy plans.
Hence the catchy slogan - the soundbite. Lately it seems Coun. Suzanne Anton, who hopes to win Vancouver's mayoralty this November, can't say "Robertson's Riot" enough times. "Families First" also comes to mind.
It's no shocker that the public's attention is flighty, but I must admit I was quite distressed to learn recently that voters can lose interest inside of the second or two it takes to scan the names on a ballot. Last month, both North Vancouver councils decided to swap their alphabetically ordered civic ballots for ones with a randomly drawn order, because apparently candidates at the top of the list have an advantage over their later-lettered rivals.
Really? A person takes the time to get registered to vote, show up, wait in line, shuffle into the little cardboard hutch and then loses their patience after the first couple of ticks?
A wholly unscientific study of current North Shore councils doesn't support this idea. Yes, it's true that six of seven members of city council have names from the first half of the alphabet and three of them from the first half-dozen letters. But the District of North Vancouver seems weighted towards the middle of the list, while the school board looks fairly balanced between early and late letters. If anything, West Vancouverites look to favour candidates further down the ballot.
What's more, I would have thought that in North Vancouver's famously low-turnout elections, those that did bother to vote, almost by definition, were the people with some idea of who's who and some voting criteria beyond who will get them out of the booth a half beat faster.
I didn't want it to be true, but several people far more numerate than I assured me that the "downballot effect" is quite real. A series of academic studies say it can mean up to a five-percentagepoint difference, well within the margin of victory in a lot of cases.
Market researchers randomize each individual ballot separately to cancel this out, a method dubbed the Robson rotation. Provincial law currently prohibits this in civic elections. So all the North Vancouver councils have really done is hand this unearned advantage to randomly chosen candidates. I guess if you ran enough times it would eventually even out after a decade or two of trying. But this is not any fairer than the old system.
This may all seem a trifle frivolous. City councillor Rod Clark certainly seemed to think so as he somewhat theatrically declared a conflict of interest and left the room during the ballot debate. Nor does it seem as pressing an issue of fairness as, say, campaign financing. But it does suggest that other semi-conscious factors may act on voters' minds in the privacy of the polling booth.
While we have Waltons and Walkers and Trentadues on our councils, good luck finding anyone without an obviously European name. We are blessed with a truly multi-ethnic community here, which is reflected in our cultural and business elites and yet nowhere to be seen in local government. Or any level of government, for that matter.
I'm not just picking on the North Shore here: in Vancouver in 2008, COPE's Ellen Woodsworth was at the very bottom of the alphabetical ballot but she still edged out Kashmir Dhaliwal for a seat, the only Vision Vancouver candidate to not get elected. Similarly, Daljit Sidhu came dead last among the NPA's admittedly doomed slate.
Before you write this off as hand-wringing overinterpretation, consider that a 2009 study by UBC economics professor Philip Oreopoulos found that a resume with an Anglo name on it had a 40 per cent better chance of leading to a job interview than an identical one with an Asian name.
I was pretty startled when I read that a couple of years back. Having done quite a bit of hiring in my previous career, I asked myself if I had ever, at some level, chosen to call a Smith before a Singh or a Wilson before a Wong. After some reflection I reached a pretty uncomfortable answer: yeah,
maybe I did.
Of course I wouldn't ever consciously make a hiring decision based on ethnicity. But if I'm really honest with myself, maybe a Benjamin who needed to fill a position quickly with a minimum of drama would gravitate towards a name that suggested - wrongly, of course - a certain cultural and linguistic sympathy. Is that unconscious prejudice or just laziness? Maybe both.
That's what I suspect goes on in polling booths. Voters who haven't researched their candidates and already made their minds up are likely to err on the side of someone who appears, however superficially, to have something in common with them.
If we can succumb that easily to a bias we publicly deplore, it's no wonder we also thoughtlessly favour folks "at the top of the list."
North Vancouver has taken a well-intentioned but ultimately meaningless step to try and remove alphabetic tilt from its civic elections. With a tweak of provincial law, we could probably get rid of it entirely. Ridding our process of more insidious biases will be a much harder task.
- balldritt@nsnews.com
