Randomizing the ballot for October’s civic election
The October 20, 2018 Vancouver civic election will present voters with a really big, but name-randomized ballot. This eliminates the small advantage that seems to have gone to candidates whose names were at the “A” end of the alphabet.
Check out the results for mayor, council, school and park HERE, and find out whose name is furthest from it’s alpha-method location. Many thanks to Christopher Porter (a.k.a. canadianveggie), who compiled this spreadsheet for viewing on Google docs.
It’ll be interesting to see if the unaffiliated candidates in the first 10 names on the council list get a boost in numbers as a result.
It doesn’t exactly solve the problem, does it? I mean, randomizing just means that a lottery decides who gets an unfair electoral advantage rather than the last name of the candidates deciding that. Why don’t they just print different ballots with different orders of the candidates names so as to eliminate that effect entirely?
I agree. But one thing that can be gleaned from a couple of elections using this format is how much of a difference it actually makes. I’m sure somebody could analyse the results over three elections (including the last one alphabetically) and figure it out.