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Voting ABCs: randomized ballot proposal back before Vancouver council June 6

Moving from a ballot with candidates’ names listed in alphabetical order to one with a randomized name order would cost the city an additional $235,000 for the 2018 civic election, says a staff report going before the city’s finance and services comm
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Vision Vancouver Coun. Andrea Reimer is concerned election candidates with last names starting with A, B, C or D have an unfair advantage. Six of 10 current councillors have last names from the early part of the alphabet.

Moving from a ballot with candidates’ names listed in alphabetical order to one with a randomized name order would cost the city an additional $235,000 for the 2018 civic election, says a staff report going before the city’s finance and services committee June 6.

The funds would be spent on communicating the change to the public and paying for additional staff at voting stations.

Vision Vancouver Coun. Andrea Reimer, who isn’t running for re-election, is pushing for the change. She put a motion forward at the April 17 council meeting to make the switch.

Council didn’t approve the motion but directed staff to draft a bylaw that would allow for council candidates in the 2018 general election to be listed on the ballot in random order as per the provisions of Section 79 of the Vancouver Charter. 

Reimer is concerned candidates with last names starting with A, B, C or D have an unfair advantage. Six of 10 current councillors have last names from the early part of the alphabet.

Reimer also suggests an alphabetical bias in the ballot may have a particularly negative impact on people who have last names that are Chinese, South Asian, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese or Latino, and others, as people from these cultures are less likely to have last names with A, B, C or D.

Such concerns are highlighted in the June 6 staff report, which states: “There is a longstanding collection of empirical evidence demonstrating that voters without well-defined preferences are more likely to select the top listed names on ballots due to cognitive fatigue. In an alphabetically ordered ballot, candidates whose surnames begin with the initial letters may benefit from this positional bias.

“For this reason, numerous electoral studies caution that ordering candidates alphabetically undermines the principle of fair elections and advocate for randomizing and rotating ballot name order to offset the bias.”

The report recommends council approve the $235,000 increase to the election budget and proposes amendments to the election bylaw to allow the name order to be determined by lot.

The proposed bylaw and ballot name order would apply only to mayoral, council and park board races.

As part of its research, staff looked into 14 municipalities in B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba — provinces that allow for a randomized ballot style in municipal elections — to find out about potential impacts. Six cities indicated they had a randomized ballot form, although most of those have short candidate lists.

That’s not the case in Vancouver where, in the 2014 election, there were 119 names.

The Township of Langley had a randomized ballot between 1993 and 2011 but there were numerous complaints after the 2011 race, including voters having trouble finding the names of candidates. The ballot listed 41 names — three for mayor, 11 for school trustee and 27 for council. Township of Langley staff also noted that it took longer for people to vote. By the 2014 election, the township changed back to an alphabetical ballot.

Vancouver staff anticipate more spoiled ballots and longer wait times but they say those concerns will be mitigated by spending the additional $235,000. The breakdown includes $110,000 to publicize the change, $65,000 to printing extra election material and $60,000 to hire additional support staff at voting locations. More voting booths will also be added at stations where space allows.

NPA Coun. Melissa De Genova has already questioned, on social media, the proposed $175,000 communications budget.

 

 

Council had asked staff to look into whether putting candidates’ photographs on the ballot would help reduce voter confusion but it’s not technologically feasible to do this for the 2018 election.

It would also add length to the ballots and create production issues that would cost, at minimum, an additional $320,000.

Some analyses also suggest that people whose facial appearance is rated more positively poll better.

“Staff are therefore concerned that the inclusion of photographs may trigger prejudices based on age, gender and other qualities that may be derived from a candidate’s appearance, ultimately undermining the fairness of an election,” the report states.

The Persons with Disabilities Advisory Committee worries that a randomized ballot order will confuse some voters, “particularly seniors, people with reduced cognition and people who are visually impaired.”

The committee recommended that the city provide, in advance, the confirmed ballot so people can familiarize themselves with the order.

Reimer told the Courier in an email that because her original motion was replaced with another one asking for the staff report, it effectively delayed the decision process by 50 days.

If the bylaw passes at the June 6 meeting, there will be enough time to implement the change for the upcoming civic election, she said. The bylaw would still need to come back to council for enactment, so it would be at least two more weeks before it came into effect.

“Another delay would very likely kill any chance of doing it in time for this election,” Reimer said. “Also, every week it’s not being passed is time that is lost for what the staff report points to, which is getting people aware of and used to a different system.”

Reimer said she isn’t surprised by anything in the staff report and she hopes the fact it points to evidence that alphabetical ballots favour candidates with A, B, C names is compelling enough to quash any “delay tactics” by other councillors.

“Having worked on seven municipal elections, and several more federal and provincial elections, I felt the clerk’s office took a bit of an overly cautious view on the ability of voters to navigate a ballot. But, on balance, it’s better to have conservative recommendations than overly optimistic ones,” she added.

noconnor@vancourier.com

@naoibh