Mar 19 2010
November Ballot Order
We just did the drawing for ballot position among the three established political parties in the November election. Marcia Morrison, an Urbana High School student who was the youngest person to cast a vote in the Primary election pulled the parties out of a hat. The order of parties will be:
Republican
Green
Democratic
New political parties and independents will appear after the established political parties.
Has any election law consideration been given to permitting randomized ballot position, as in each ballot is different, not just randomizing a master ballot? Seems to me that a system could be trivially designed to support this, perhaps by way of a bar code or OCR matching the vote cast to the candidate, and would negate ballot position as a consideration in election outcome.
there’s a number of systems for this across the country. randomizing by precinct, a randomized alphabetical order, etc. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a change proposed in Illinois. I dislike having the randomization by precinct because I like having the ballot look the same for every voter. But I like the randomized alphabet.