By BILL CHAISSON
[email protected]
CONCORD — In yesterday’s Eagle Times we published a number of sample ballots from several towns to give voters a look at what might be in front of them when they get to the voting booth. The Newport sample ballot on the front page put the Democratic candidates in the first column, the Republicans in the second and the “Libertarian and other candidates” in the third column. The Plainfield ballot had the Republicans first, “Libertarian and other” second, and Democrats third. A reader wrote to us to complain that the Newport ballot must counterfeit and that we were publishing “fake news.” Thus intrigued, we looked into the process of ballot creation.
A call to the town clerk in Newport, Liselle Dufort, established that the towns are not involved in the process of making the ballots; they receive them from the office of the New Hampshire Secretary of State. Dufort was not aware of how the columns were ordered, but she knew that each town had entirely different ballots created for it. She recommended to we speak with Dave Scanlan, the deputy secretary of state.
Scanlan proved easy to reach by phone and knowledgeable about the process. Historically, the order of columns had been determined by results of the previous election; the party that amassed the most votes came first on the ballot the following election. “In the 2000s,” Scanlan recalled, the statute was changed so that the order had to be randomized. “The statute says that we have rotate the columns among the parties, so that they appear in each position an equal number of times as regularly as is reasonably possible.”
The random drawing is not done electronically, as one might assume, but with pieces of paper and a box. Scanlan said that it is a bit of an event at the office of the secretary of state because there are 309 different ballots to put in order.
Under the current statute, said Scanlan, the order of the parties on each ballot is determined by the order that they are drawn at random from a box. In races where there are several candidates, the order in which they will appear in any public list is also determined by random drawing, but on the ballot multiple candidates of the same party are listed alphabetically by surname.
In the case of the sample ballots in yesterday’s Eagle Times, in Newport, the Democratic Party was draw first, while in Plainfield it was the Republican Party. For Claremont Ward 1, the Libertarian Party was assigned the first column.
When do these drawings take place? In June, according to Scanlan, after the candidate filing period ends. The filing period having ended, the parties are then given a few days to fill any vacant spots on the ticket. On the Wednesday following the close of this interval, the drawing are done and the ordering of parties and names on 309 ballots is determined.
How it got this way
The change to the state’s way of ordering ballots is the result of a Superior Court decision in 2006 that was afterward upheld in the state Supreme Court. In the Supreme Court decision of August 2006, Akins v. Secretary of State, Justice Richard E. Galway, writing for the court, recounted that the Democratic party and candidates from all parties claimed in Superior Court to have been disadvantaged by the ballot order in the 2004 general election as prescribed by RSA 656:5. At that time the ballot was arranged in “office blocks” (much as the Vermont sample ballots are arranged; see yesterday’s Eagle Times, page A2), with all candidates running for the office grouped within the box. Within the boxes, the candidate(s) from the party that had been the largest vote-getter in the previous election would be listed first. Within a party list, the candidates were arranged in alphabetical order by surname.
In 2004, according to Galway, the legislature amended RSA 656:5 to create the existing “party column” arrangement, which puts all of one party’s candidates in a single column. The legislature retained the “top-vote-getter” rule and used it to assign the order of columns. The 2004 amended statute, however, discarded the requirement of listing candidates in alphabetical order.
In the Superior Court, as Galway reconstructed it, the petitioners presented expert testimony about the “primacy effect,” the advantage given to candidates by being listed first. Secretary of State William Gardner testified that the last time a party other the Republican Party had been listed first on a New Hampshire ballot was in 1966, after the Democrats gained a majority of votes in the general election of 1964.
The petitioners argued that the “top-vote-getter” approach combined with the “primacy effect” violated the New Hampshire Constitution’s assurance that every state resident as an equal right to be elected to office. Both the Superior and the Supreme courts agreed with the petitioners on this score. Furthermore, the Supreme Court decided that a “manageable ballot” could be achieved without either the “top-vote-getter” rule or alphabetization.
Thus was born the present system of randomized drawing to order each ballot separately. A sample ballot for each town and ward is available for inspection at the website of the Secretary of State: sos.nh.gov/Sample18Gen.aspx
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