Race, Ethnicity, and Alphabetically Ordered Ballots

A number of scholars have recently argued that ballot order effects give certain candidates an unfair advantage in elections and have urged states to randomize or rotate the order of candidate names to make elections more rational and fair. This article suggests that advocates of reform have been too quick to concede that static order-ing methods are nondiscriminatory. One common method of ballot ordering, arranging candidates in alphabet-ical order by their last names, disadvantages specific minority populations by pushing their candidates down the ballot. To substantiate this argument, I engineer two computer simulation experiments which show a sig-nificant link between ballot position and racial/ethnic status under alphabetic ordering laws. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are particularly burdened by these laws. Because courts apply a higher level of scrutiny to election laws that infringe fundamental voting rights than laws that merely regulate elections, the discrimina-tory impact of alphabetic ordering rules significantly bolsters the case to rotate or randomize ballot order. Anumber of scholars have recently arguedthat ballot order effects give certain candidates an unfair advantage in elections and have urged states to randomize or rotate the order of candidate names to make elections more rational and fair (e.g.