We started out by lining up on different sides of the street, then by saying our vote out loud. We've used many methods to vote, but most of them were corruptible by the party in power. But have we reached the pinnacle? Have we finally achieved the "perfect ballot?"
Today, Dan Cassino of Farleigh Dickinson University and Josh Pasek of the University of Michigan walk us through the history of ballot design, the ballot fiasco in 2000, and how some ballots continue to favor one candidate (or party) over the other.
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Transcript:
Note: This transcript was AI-generated and may contain errors
Rebecca Lavoie: Hey, Nick.
Nick Capodice: Yes, Rebecca.
Rebecca Lavoie: So here we are taping an episode of Civics 101. And, you know, I think all the time about this podcast and how easy it sounds. You know what I'm talking about. You and Hannah do your work. You make it sound easy. I learn something every week when I listen to it. But because I work with you each and every week, I know it's not easy to make, right?
Nick Capodice: No, right.
Rebecca Lavoie: It takes weeks and weeks of research to put an episode together. Interviews. Sometimes we throw whole episodes out if we don't think they're going to work, or if we can't get the right interview and this work, this kind of journalism, it isn't cheap, and we can only get it done when listeners like you contribute to Civics 101 to keep our show going. Want to say something else, Nick?
Nick Capodice: Well, thank you, Rebecca. And let me just add that it's our podcast fundraiser, which means that if listeners give right now at the $10 a month level to support our mission to unpack how our democracy works, they get our brand new tote bag. It's really cool. You had a hand in designing it, right, Rebecca.
Rebecca Lavoie: I sure did. Listen, I can't help, uh, put a little tote bag together. I love a good public radio tote.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, it's a classic for a reason, but you can check it out and all the other gifts on our website, civics101podcast.org. Or just click the link in the show notes. And thanks.
Archive: You take this lever.
Archive: And when you do this, it. What happens?
Archive: Americans have a heritage of the vote no other nation on earth can match. Before the 2000 presidential election, most people thought Chad was the name of a person. You will register and count your own vote by returning this handle.
Archive: On Friday, a federal judge blocked New Jersey's primary ballot design. New Jersey has been using what's sometimes referred to as a county line system.
Archive: But out of every thousand people, some hurried, some nervous, some uninformed. How many do you think? Do it perfectly.
Nick Capodice: You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice and.
Rebecca Lavoie: I'm Rebecca Lavoie.
Nick Capodice: Rebecca Lavoie is subbing in for Hannah today because Hannah's got the flu. It's like Jamie's got a gun. Hannah's got the flu. Oh, nothing we can do.
Rebecca Lavoie: It's not anything like that for Hannah. Feel better soon? Yeah.
Nick Capodice: Feel better soon. Hannah, uh, Rebecca is our executive producer on the show, and she knows what she's doing. Uh, but today we are talking about punching the Chad, filling in the oval, tapping the screen and pulling the lever. Because we're talking about ballots.
Rebecca Lavoie: Wait a minute. Did you just say pulling the lever? Are there machines that still have levers?
Nick Capodice: I'll talk about pulling the lever to vote a little bit later. Who was it who said, give me a large enough lever and I can move the world?
Rebecca Lavoie: Uh, that was Archimedes.
Nick Capodice: Archimedes? Well, yeah. The OG man in the bathtub. Uh, we're not going as far back as Archimedes. But today we are going to talk about how we used to vote in the United States, how we got to our modern-day ballot system, and finally, how the design of our ballots still, even now, continues to be controversial. I'm going to even talk about a ballot design that was declared just last month, April 2024, to be unfair.
Rebecca Lavoie: Now, I can't wait for all of this, but I have to give a reading suggestion for anyone out there who's not familiar with how we used to vote. There's this brilliant piece by Jill Lepore from The New Yorker in 2008 titled Rock, paper, scissors. Please look that up. Yes.
Nick Capodice: It's fantastic. It's hilarious. It gets our highest recommendation.
Rebecca Lavoie: Okay, so let's get to it. Nick, how did we used to vote?
Dan Cassino: So in America, uh, the earliest types of voting we had were all public voting.
Nick Capodice: That there is none other than Dan Cassino, professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson University. I've used that music to introduce him no fewer than 12 times.
Dan Cassino: So this was basically two categories. One was where you would actually use some sort of marker, so people would actually take beans or marbles and put them in a barrel or put them, and then you would count the numbers that went in each one.
Nick Capodice: Fun bit of etymology here, Rebecca. This is where we get the word "ballot." It's from the Italian ballot meaning a little ball.
Rebecca Lavoie: Really?
Nick Capodice: Yeah. So what we think of as pieces of paper started as dropping balls in a jar. But there were some other fun variants.
Dan Cassino: In some states, I think up in New Hampshire, actually, they had basically people divide up on different sides of the street. So in your town, some people go on one side of street, some people go to the other side of street. And that would be you counting people on each side of the street. The most common, though, was we call viva voce.
Rebecca Lavoie: Viva voce. Does that mean voice vote?
Nick Capodice: Uh, technically funny enough, the translation is word of mouth.
Rebecca Lavoie: Okay, so, you know, I know a little something about that. We used to have a show called Word of Mouth here at NHPR, but, like, is that like, telling people who you're voting for? I don't really get it.
Dan Cassino: Voce. Voting simply means you would go in to the polling place and you would publicly announce who you were voting for, and the guys who are running the polls would then write down your name in the name of the people, everyone you were voting for. And this had the advantage. It's thought to be resistant to any sort of corruption because it's all public. We know exactly who voted for who, and it's a public declaration so everyone else can look at you and go, well, this guy lives in the town. They're saying who they want to vote for. They write it down and anyone afterwards can check the logs.
Rebecca Lavoie: This is completely different from our current system, and I can't imagine anybody being willing to do it this way today. But I just want to say that I can see some positives in the viva voce. You can? Yeah, for one, it's fraud-proof, right? Other people hear who you voted for, you have witnesses, and since there are logs, it'd be pretty dangerous to go back and fudge the numbers. Also, there's something kind of, I don't know, brave about it. Brazen. It's sort of like a fearless declaration. You're just walking in and saying who you're voting for. You're just saying where you stand politically. I kind of like that.
Nick Capodice: I feel the same way. Like it seems fun and brave. Like for this brief moment, you are called upon in public to give your civic opinion. But the downside is you're called upon in public to give your civic opinion.
Dan Cassino: That means you're not free to vote for whoever you want, because if you vote for the wrong person, you might get in trouble. So this is especially important when we're looking at 19th century American politics, where political parties are so important and you might be getting social benefits, you might be getting your job because you are affiliated with a certain political party. And therefore, if you vote against that political party, you're in trouble. Someone's gonna be asking you, what were you doing? Why were you doing this?
Rebecca Lavoie: Someone, like, say, I don't know, your local party boss?
Nick Capodice: Yeah. We're not talking about your neighbor who doesn't like your politics, getting mad at the signs you have in your yard. In an election in New York City, for example, your vote can have massive ramifications. A political machine like Tammany Hall, they could be responsible for your job, the jobs of your family members. Maybe you owe them money. You vote for a candidate other than the one you're quote unquote supposed to, and you are in trouble.
Rebecca Lavoie: Side note What is Tammany Hall, exactly?
Nick Capodice: I'm so glad you asked. Uh, the most famous boss of Tammany Hall, which is what we call a political machine, which is like a political party in power that just cannot be ousted no matter what. The most famous boss was Boss Tweed, William Meager Tweed, who had all the judges, all the cops, all the new Americans in his back pocket. And no matter what you did, you could not get them unelected.
Dan Cassino: So the viva voce voting was still used up until the middle part of the 19th century in a lot of districts. So even in the 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, we saw a number of states still using that. But most states by that point had switched over to printed ballots. Now, I know that sounds like what we do now. Oh, there's a printed ballot and you fill out who you want, but it's not. The idea was that the ballot was not printed by the state, by the government. Rather the ballot was printed by the political party.
Nick Capodice: Political party. Newspapers had preprinted ballots in them for their party. You could just cut it out on Election Day and take it to the polls. You've seen pictures of these early ballots, right, Rebecca?
Rebecca Lavoie: Oh, absolutely. They're not like a ballot we think of today - just names on like a sterile piece of paper. These were ornately designed. And weren't they colored differently for different parties? Yeah.
Nick Capodice: So you take your ballot, you'd walk to the ballot box. Everyone would see the color of the piece of paper that you put in it.
Dan Cassino: These ballots were sometimes just beautifully decorated. They used really interesting typography. They would put pictures of the candidates at the top. They would have slogans, often horribly racist and sexist slogans, but they'd have slogans on the ballots telling you who you were voting for when you voted for them. Almost. If they're doing their last minute, here's why you're supposed to vote for us. We promise we'll keep Chinese labor out of our out of our country. And imagine you say, well, I want to vote for, I don't know, James Buchanan for president, but I don't like the Senate candidate. What in the world are you supposed to do with that? You're going to go and cut out the name of the Senate candidate off that ballot, and Scotch tape another name on there? No you can't. Scotch tape doesn't exist. So there's no way to actually do this. There's no way to have a split ticket vote. So all voting is straight party line voting.
Rebecca Lavoie: So this is what we call now straight ticket voting, right?
Nick Capodice: Yeah. And that word ticket was used because these ballots looked a lot like train tickets.
Rebecca Lavoie: Really.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. So you'd walk in and if anyone important was watching, you'd hold your pink or your blue ticket nice and high before dropping it in the box and real quick, uh, there was also some drama about the box itself.
Rebecca Lavoie: Box drama.
Nick Capodice: Box drama.
Rebecca Lavoie: It was just like, wasn't it? Just like a box, like a big wooden box.
Nick Capodice: It was a big wooden box. And this was a problem in the 1800s, because people started to explore these boxes and find out that lots of them had secret wooden compartments with extra ballots inside of them, and people were doing a lot of their stuffing on the day. The ballots were really thin, like tissue paper thin, so it wasn't hard to fold up 10 or 20 of them and stuff them in the ballot slot.
Dan Cassino: So to avoid that sort of malfeasance, uh, they, they moved to transparent boxes. This also meant they had feedback on the day of the election for how many people were voting for which candidate.
Rebecca Lavoie: Oh, I think I see where this is going, where. So if it's 12:00 and you're noticing, say, a paucity of red ballots in the glass box, you're going to do whatever it takes to get more of them in there, right? Yep.
Dan Cassino: You got a telegram, you got a runner over from another say, oh, we don't have votes here. Okay, cool. Go out, round up some more people. We'll get some more people to come in and vote. This, as you might expect, also led to a great deal of malfeasance. Because what do you do if you run out of people supposed to vote? Well, you got somebody who previously voted. You get them to come back.
Nick Capodice: This is just a fun side note, Rebecca, but have you ever heard of the whisker vote?
Rebecca Lavoie: Whisker vote? No.
Nick Capodice: Supposedly, Tammany Hall was inordinately fond of voters who had a full beard because they were worth four votes. So, you know, the guy would go in and vote, go out. A party boss would tell him the name of a recently deceased person. He'd shave the bottom of his beard, vote again with that new name and so on, past muttonchops all the way to clean shaven.
Rebecca Lavoie: So it seems to me a wooden box or glass box, viva voce or a colored ticket. Our system of early American voting was pretty vulnerable to party corruption.
Nick Capodice: It was. And we didn't even get into the counting of the ballots. The party that won the last election was in charge of counting the ballots for the next election. What? Yeah. So there's like a famous Thomas Nast cartoon of Boss Tweed saying, as long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?
Rebecca Lavoie: Okay, so when did a shift finally come? Like, when did we start to move toward a system that we all know today? You know, the one that's more private, that's more secure?
Nick Capodice: Unsurprisingly, the shift comes during a movement of political reform in the late 19th century, a time of activism and adjustment to how we do things, the Progressive era.
Rebecca Lavoie: Nick, I think the Progressive era sneaks its way into your episodes almost as much as Richard Nixon does.
Nick Capodice: That's true. I cannot deny I'm not a crook.
Dan Cassino: And so we get a movement in the United States, really starting in California and Massachusetts. Uh, California is really a hotbed of early progressivism. Uh, again, because this is the period where they're basically rewriting their state constitution so they can put all these progressive ideals into their state constitution. And they say, we're not going to do this. We're going to standardize the ballots. And this is what first happens in the U.S., in California. Now, this does not mean that the state is going to print the ballots. No, don't be ridiculous. What this means is that they actually say you have to print your ballot only on white paper. It has to be a certain size of paper. And you can get this paper from the secretary of state's office. And so you either get it from the secretary of state's office or you can do it yourself. It has to be the exact same kind of paper. And the idea is that everyone's voting in the same color and size of paper. You can't tell who voted for who, so therefore you can't punish people or reward people for voting the way it's supposed to because you don't actually know how they voted.
Nick Capodice: Now, you'd still sign the back of the ballot. So it wasn't fully anonymous yet. But eventually California starts to print the ballots themselves. The state made the ballots, not the party. And that's the big change. And shortly thereafter, some states go the extra step. Taking a page out of an ally's book, our Democratic friend from over 10,000 miles away.
Nick Capodice: And this is an innovation we get from Australia, as we call it today, the Australian ballot. Australian ballot simply means it is a private ballot filled out in the polling place. It is printed by the government. So the vote is anonymous. You don't know who voted for whom. There's no way to link those back to each other. It's private, so you can't be penalized for voting one way or the other. And those are big innovations. And this is actually the, uh, this actually becomes a big debate in early, late 19th, early 20th century America about whether the Australian ballot or his detractors called it the kangaroo ballot can be a good innovation. Now, why would they be against this? Okay, maybe because you're a political party. You like giving your patronage jobs, but also because they say this is a ballot for cowards, right? Why do you need your ballot to be private? Aren't you proud of who you're voting for? Are you ashamed to stand up in front of your fellow countrymen and say who you're voting for? Right? Shouldn't you be proud of the people you're voting for? Shouldn't you know you're saying, oh, I want to vote for something so unpopular I will get in trouble. If I vote for this, then why are you voting for it? So maybe you shouldn't be doing this at all.
Nick Capodice: Regardless of its detractors, states started to use the Australian ballot and here we are. But before we jump ahead to modern ballot design, Dan told me one last story of ballot malfeasance. That involved an eventual president. And it happened in Texas in 1948.
Dan Cassino: There's one county where the sheriff is responsible for paying the poll tax for the voters and collecting their votes, and so you'd wait until the day after the election and say, all right, we're down by this many votes. I need you to get me this many. And he would go in and he would just say, yep, that many votes. We got them all there. And you know, Lyndon Johnson, you know this was this was common practice in Texas at the time. The Hill Country, Texas at the time, Lyndon Johnson was considered to be worse than everyone else because at one point he waited until three days after the election. Right. So everyone went in and said, okay, everyone got their extra votes from other people for the people supposed to. And Johnson was still losing. So he went back and then got his guys to find another couple boxes of ballots. You know, three days after the election that all happened to be cast in alphabetical order, that were enough to put him over the top in the election, earning him the name in the in the Senate of landslide Lyndon.
Rebecca Lavoie: Landslide Lyndon.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. Because he won by like 87 votes.
Rebecca Lavoie: And Johnson got away with this a box of votes in alphabetical order appearing at the last minute.
Nick Capodice: He he did get away with it. He became the president. Box 13 is the one that had those votes. And this Senate victory was challenged all the way up to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court said this is a state primary. It's run by a party. We have no business interfering with how the parties run their own elections. We've got to take a quick break here, after which I'll get to the lever that maybe didn't move the world, but it certainly affected an election in our lifetimes. And I'm also going to get to some ballot design issues that continue to sway voters to this very day.
Rebecca Lavoie: But before that break, a reminder that a donation to our listener-supported show in any amount is a vote for Civics 101 and our ceaseless quest to break down the basics of democracy. And you can make that donation on our website, civics101podcast.org. Or even easier, click the link right in your show notes. We're back. We're talking about ballots. And we were just about to talk about the lever.
Nick Capodice: Have you ever used a lever voting machine?
Rebecca Lavoie: I watched my mom use it when I was a kid, but I have not.
Nick Capodice: Have you? I did in the first election I voted in. I was going to college in Boston, not Cambridge, by the way. Boston. Can I make that? Can I make that joke?
Rebecca Lavoie: Well, if they don't like it, they're definitely going to tell you.
Nick Capodice: Okay, so that first vote that I made was a lever machine. Here to explain them again is Dan Cassino.
Dan Cassino: And these are basically voting machines that look like a steampunk slot machine because there's these little things and you have all these little levers you push, these little, you know, up or down, you switch the you put the switches to decide who you want to vote for. There's actually mechanism built in there to make sure you do not over vote. So you literally cannot vote for if it says vote for three out of five, the machine will not let you vote for more than three out of five. When you're all done, then you take this giant thing like you're doing a slot machine. You pull down on it, and as long as you do it hard enough, it makes the punches. And now you've got your vote. Uh, these are actually inspired by player pianos and sort of punch cards used in player pianos. Um, you think about it, it's the same mechanism, right? We have the thing to punch it in. We punch a certain pattern, and then that pattern of the punches, punch holes is used to count everything up.
Nick Capodice: So when I used it that one time, that was kind of like an airplane bathroom. Like I pulled the lever to start it and it closed the curtain behind me, and then I pulled the lever again when I was done and the curtain opened up again, it was absolutely thrilling.
Rebecca Lavoie: Okay, so the thrill aside, are there downsides to the lever machines?
Nick Capodice: Absolutely. There are downsides. So they're an improvement because they're easier to count. But some people couldn't reach the switches. Other people weren't strong enough to pull the lever. So you'd have to call somebody in to help you, you know, cast your vote. An alternative to lever machines was called a stylus machine. For these, you had like a little needle, you had your own stylus, and you just punched out the holes yourself.
Dan Cassino: Essentially directly creating the punch card that you would get out of the mechanical lever machine. The problem with this punch card voting is that, first off, it can be very confusing because in order to create the different columns of the punch cards, uh, to register all of your votes, which would actually have to do is have a ballot where options are printed on both the left and the right sides of it. So imagine this weird little book and you're voting in the middle. Candidate number one is listed on the top. Top row can number two is listed on the second row, but on the right side can number three is on the back in the third row on the left side. And so it was very, very easy to wind up voting for the wrong person, especially if it's Florida and it is full of very, very old people. Um, so this we in the year 2000, we actually have proven that this sort of overvote, uh, for some candidates because people voted punch the wrong punch card. Right. So Pat Buchanan got, uh, who was a very conservative candidate, 2000 election of Florida got way more votes from Jewish nursing homes than we would have expected because his name was listed. Looks like kind of where next to where Al Gore's name was.
Rebecca Lavoie: So we've been talking about the fact that we owe the 2000 election its own episode. But long story short, there was this recount triggered in Florida during the Bush Gore election because it was close enough to warrant a recount, and the Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4 that that recount be stopped, which in effect handed George W Bush the presidency.
Nick Capodice: And one of the major issues was that all the different districts were determining in different ways how to count ballots that weren't a perfectly clear punch.
Dan Cassino: And so we get all these weird definitional arguments. What is an actual vote is a vote. If you tried to push out the Chad and failed. So we have an indented Chad. What if you pushed it through? But not all four corners of the Chad came off. Then we have a hanging Chad. Does that count as a vote or is the Chad off for it to be counted as a valid vote? The problem with this is not that these definitions are bad, although this is a stupid argument to be having. The problem is that in Florida in 2000, most famously because it was such a close election that different counties applied different standards and even sometimes different vote counters apply different standards. The hanging chads matter, indented chads matter, hanging chads, we don't know. It's all up in the air.
Archive: The chads that are being dimpled during the counting process that are then objected to and are now being counted are are tainted ballots.
Archive: There are dimpled ballots. There are ballots with creases. There were ballots with lipstick on them. There were ballots with handwriting on them.
Rebecca Lavoie: Okay, I know this stylus machines are pretty much gone, as are the lever machines these days. What we do now is fill in a little bubble, like we're taking the SATs and then slide it into a machine which reads it like a scantron, and it's spare. It feels spartan like names on a white piece of paper, and that feels about as fair as I can imagine it.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, it is spare. But let me ask you this. Rebecca, whose name should come first on a ballot.
Josh Pasek: So I've done research in the past on on candidate name order on the ballot. So it's is there an advantage to being listed first?
Nick Capodice: This is Josh Pasek. He's an associate professor of communication and media and political science at the University of Michigan. He studies how people make electoral choices, and he was recently called upon as an expert to testify on New Jersey's controversial primary ballot, which I'll get into a little bit later.
Josh Pasek: There has been a handful of sort of political science papers that have gone out and actually examined the results of being listed in various positions. And you can do this because there are some states that vary the order of candidates names with data from actual elections. And so we went out and we collected a whole pile of, um, results from various California elections where candidates are listed in different orders on the ballot. So in each assembly district, the candidates are listed in a different order and the top candidates put on the bottom, etc., and they sort of go around. And so you can say, well, how did candidate A perform when they were in first position versus when they were in some other position? And how about candidate B? And unsurprisingly, what you find when you do this and there have now been so many studies done of this, it's almost crazy. Um, it's a very well-established effect weight.
Rebecca Lavoie: But how crazy. I don't think I know a single person who has ever gone into a voting booth and made their choice for president because their name was first.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, that's fair. And Josh admits it's not an astronomical advantage for presidential elections. You're looking at a 0.3 to 0.5% increase due to name order. But if you go further down the ballot.
Rebecca Lavoie: You mean those local offices, the ones that you say over and over and over on the show, are like ten times more important to our actual daily lives than federal elections?
Nick Capodice: Yeah, those offices.
Josh Pasek: When you start dealing with something like, well, how much does a candidate in a primary election gain by being the first listed candidate for a, you know, for a nonpartisan judicial election? In those kinds of circumstances, it can be pretty big because people go into the ballot and they're like, are any of these people are what the heck is a comptroller? You know, there are things people vote for that they don't even really think about before they get there, because you get brought in by the, you know, the presidential and senatorial candidates. You don't really decide you're going to vote because, I mean, unless you know the guy because somebody is running for county freeholder, right? And so as you get down to those sort of lower on the ballot things, yeah, whatever seems like an acceptable option is fine.
Nick Capodice: Ballot fatigue is real. Rebecca, I felt it. You felt it. My phone got hot from googling the names of the seven people running for Registrar of Deeds, and sometimes you just make an uninformed choice. And the further down a ballot a contest is, the more the order of names matters.
Rebecca Lavoie: You know how I pick when I can't figure it out? Nick. Side story.
Nick Capodice: How do you do it?
Rebecca Lavoie: I kind of look at like, the signs on my neighbor's lawns and I'm like, if I know I agree with that neighbor,
Rebecca Lavoie: But how do we pick which name gets put first? How does that work?
Nick Capodice: All the states do it differently. Uh, some states do a completely random draw. California does something that I think is pretty hilarious. They randomized the alphabet and then they list the candidates in that new alphabet order. Uh, some states do regular alphabetical order within their party, which is also listed in alphabetical order.
Rebecca Lavoie: So that would give, like Alan Aardvark of the Alliance Party like a huge advantage. Right. Because he'd always be at the top.
Nick Capodice: Always. It's like ah, plumbing. And then you got states like Colorado, where the party whose candidate for governor got the most votes in the previous election, they go first. It's bonkers. It's all over the place. And I want to get back to something we talked about earlier. Okay. Name order effect for president is a really small number. So let's take Josh's lowest estimation 0.3% of the vote in Florida in 2000. The final count before the recount was canceled was about 500 votes more for George W Bush, which is a lot less than 0.3% of Florida's voting population. And close calls like that have happened since.
Josh Pasek: In the election in Michigan in 2016, that margin was also smaller than the third of a percentage point we'd expect for a presidential election. Right. So Michigan alone wasn't enough to be the complete decider? Um, you'd have needed to pull Pennsylvania 2 in 2016 for it to flip the result. Um, and Pennsylvania was a little bigger than a third of a percentage point, but not much.
Josh Pasek: Um, it was like about half a percentage point. But those two states were actually both in the margin where you'd say, well, it's possible that an order effect could have been this big.
Nick Capodice: And now finally we come to New Jersey's ballot design. So as a rule, ballots are usually designed in two ways. First, there's what's called an office block ballot. You have an office like senator, judge, sheriff, whatever. And below that office are all the names of who's running. And you pick one very straightforward. The other way is what's called a party column ballot. All the Democrats running for office are in one massive chunk, and the Republicans are in another chunk. And this system is what new Jersey was doing in their Democratic primary.
Rebecca Lavoie: Wait, I don't understand. Everyone on the ballot in a Democratic primary is a Democrat. So how on earth were they doing a party column ballot when they were all in the same party?
Josh Pasek: Primary election candidates aren't running like in separate parties. They're running in the same party. And so their thought was, okay, let's let candidates agree on a slogan to run together, and then they can get listed in the same party or column. So this is the basic strategy. Now how do you agree on a slogan? Well that's where the county parties stepped in in practice. And so whoever they endorsed was imbued with the potential to run with the county party label, the name of the county party underneath them. And so the, you know, Camden County Democratic Party, or whatever it might be, would then have their label next to all of their candidates, and those candidates would get listed together in a column.
Nick Capodice: This large group is referred to as the county line. This is a pre-picked group of candidates at the very front of the ballot. And if you weren't part of that group, you'd be in the next column, which is like a much smaller group and so on all down the line. And if you weren't with any of these groups, you'd be way out there.
Josh Pasek: And so what happens is you have sort of all the Senate candidates listed together. And then if you've got a House candidate who's not with one of the say for Senate candidates who are running, the earliest they can be listed is column five. Oh, and now if you have a, you know, a county clerk who's not listed with any of the Senate candidates or either of the already unbracketed House candidates, they're listed over in column seven. And so you can have like a candidate in column one and column two, and then nobody else till column seven. And people in new Jersey politics started referring to candidates placed out there as being listed in ballot siberia. Which is a hilarious term, but arguably reflects kind of, well, the idea that those people might be sort of hard to even notice on the ballot there.
Rebecca Lavoie: How did this affect who people voted for? I mean, I imagine the county line had, you know, a pretty strong advantage, but how strong was that advantage?
Josh Pasek: So I ran a study, right. We checked out what would happen, um. Or what? You know, what happened when we in this case sent voters a text message, um, that then linked them to a version of the ballot that either was this new Jersey ballot with randomly placed candidates for Senate and House, um, or was sort of a traditional ballot that has sort of each office separately. And we looked at how many people chose the candidate, each candidate, when they were in the county-endorsed line position versus when they were placed somewhere else. And the answer was it was, you know, well into the double digits. It was a huge effect.
Rebecca Lavoie: That is massive.
Nick Capodice: Absolutely.
Rebecca Lavoie: Huge. And you said this ballot went to court because of that advantage.
Nick Capodice: It did in April 2024. And a district judge issued an injunction to eliminate the county line ballot. However, this injunction only applies to this upcoming election 2024, and it only applies to the Democratic primary. However, it could have a ripple effect to all new Jersey ballots.
Rebecca Lavoie: When is the new Jersey primary?
Nick Capodice: June 6th, and I honestly don't know if all the county clerks and all the different districts in new Jersey will change the ballots in time. So we're going to just see. Before we wrap up here, there's one last thing I want to mention about ballots. And it's not their design necessarily. I want to get back to how we count them. Dan told me that no matter what system we use, there is going to be a margin of error. And yes, it's an admittedly small one these days using this optical scantron system, but Dan wanted to make sure I understood. The problem isn't that there is a margin of error. The problem is that there is no consistency among all the voting districts on how to address that margin of error.
Dan Cassino: And so we found out from Florida in 2000 is if essentially the margin of error of the voting system is larger than the margin in the election, then it doesn't matter how you voted, then it's going to come down to lawyers suing each other over who actually winds up winning, and what rules you're going to use to decide who winds up winning. So at a certain margin, then the lawyers are the one who decide who actually won an election.
Rebecca Lavoie: So it sounds like, as in so many things, it all comes down to consistency.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, consistency. Turns out democracy has a lot in common with parenting, predicting the weather and your favorite restaurant.
Music in this episode by ProtelR, Coconut Monkeyrocket, El Flaco Collective, Spring Gang, Rand Aldo, Hatamitsunami, Raymond Grouse, HoliznaCC0, KiLoKaz, Scott Holmes, Scott Gratton, Blue Dot Sessions, Yung Kartz and the man I pull the lever for every week, Chris Zabriskie. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR