Everyone knows running for politics is about trading on a good name.
It turns out, however, some names are inherently better than others, particularly if they start with letters at the beginning or end of the alphabet.
City of North Vancouver council voted last month to use an alphabetized ballot in this November's municipal election, which critics on and off council say gives some candidates an unfair advantage.
The motion passed with the support of five council members whose surnames begin with the letters B (three of them),C and H. Council's K and M members voted against.
Arguments in favour of an A-B-C ballot included that it is more logical, more traditional and that it is easier to find candidates' names. Also in favour of keeping the status quo, was the argument that council should be focused on prioritizing campaign finance reform if it is truly interested in promoting fairness.
The District of West Vancouver uses an alphabetized ballot while the District of North Vancouver now uses a randomized one, having switched back and forth in 1996 and 2002.
"While there's some controversy around the extent of the effects, there clearly is an effect," said David Moscrop, a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia who studies the psychology of political judgment.
With a real or perceived pressure to do one's civic duty and vote on election day, people who haven't been paying attention (or reading their local newspaper) find themselves in the ballot booth not knowing much about the candidates or the issues. Such "low information voters" tend to start looking for other cues to help them make up their minds, Moscrop said.
"It really matters for municipal politics because that's where people are the least invested.. .. You can actually see in the studies, the less information somebody has, the more likely they are to rely on something like ballot order," Moscrop said. "The way that our brains are wired, we pay more attention to things that appear first or last and less attention to stuff in the middle."
The ballot order effect is notoriously hard to study because there is no way of knowing the exact thoughts of a person as he or she casts a ballot. But there is some data from California, where all ballots have been randomized by law since the 1970s, that confirms a bump in the final polls.
In a tight race, the "two or three per cent" advantage, depending on which studies you believe, could make the difference of who is elected and who is not, though Moscrop stressed there haven't been proven cases of that.
And the order of names on the ballot is only one thing that may sway voters that probably shouldn't.
"Beauty, in the long run, is way more significant than what your name is. If anything, we should put bags on people's heads if you want to be fair," Moscrop said. "The silver bullet when it come to this stuff is finding ways to motivate people to consider what they're doing."
Still, Moscrop noted that switching to a randomized ballot costs virtually nothing and takes very little effort on the part of municipal staff so there is really no drawback to going random.
