So long to the ‘A’ advantage.

The Town of Jasper has approved a series of election changes that will no longer list names alphabetically on the ballot.

The changes, approved unanimously at Jasper’s May 18 general council meeting, have to do with the way that candidate’s names are listed on the paper ballots. 

Previously, when Jasper election ballots were printed, each ballot looked the same. The names of candidates were listed alphabetically on every single ballot.

This is now changing.

Under the new printing process, only a portion of the ballots (the first batch printed) will have names listed alphabetically. On the second batch, the name of the candidate that was previously first would be cycled to the bottom of the list and the previous second place name will now sit on top. This process will be repeated until each candidate’s name has sat on top of the ballot’s list.

These ballots will then be spread out equally at polling stations across Jasper.

“It’s a small thing, but we’re hoping that it does make things fairer,” said Beryl Cahill, administrative officer for Jasper and a returns officer in past elections.

The ballot name shift comes out of a study in the U.S. completed more than a decade ago.

In 1998, Jon A. Krosnick and Joanne Marie Miller of the Ohio State University made a study on the effects of name ordering on poll results. The study, “Impact of Candidate Name Order on Election Outcomes” showed that a candidate listed first on the ballot “nearly always” had an average vote advantage of 2.5 percent over his or her political rivals.

Krosnick and Miller’s conclusion was based on their analyses of the election returns from the 1992 legislative polls in Ohio. They found out ballot ordering had an impact on 48 percent of the 118 Ohio electoral races that they studied.

Why do voters choose the first name on the ballot? Krosnick and Miller believe the primacy effect – the psychological tendency of people to remember things that are first mentioned – could be the reason for this voter behavior.

Ballot ordering affects candidate selection when voters are not well-informed about the candidates, according to Krosnick and Miller.

“These effects were stronger in races when party-affiliations were not listed, when races had been minimally publicized, and when no incumbent was involved. Furthermore, name-order effects were stronger in counties where voters were less knowledgeable about politics,” they said in a 2008 interview with a Filipino news agency.

In the Philippines, local political parties have noticed the advantages of having an ‘A’ name so much that in 2007, 79 out of 150 groups running in the fifth party list elections had names beginning with ‘1’ or ‘A’.

In 2004, Krosnick, now a professor at the Stanford University specializing in the psychology of political behaviour, and Miller, now a political science professor at the University of Minnesota, released their second study, which reinforced their earlier findings on ballot ordering. 

The study, “An Unrecognized Need for Ballot Reform, which they co-authored with Ohio State University’s Michael P. Tichy, concluded that based on the nature of human psychology, options that are listed first will be chosen more often than those that are not.