Ballot Order Effect for Minor Party Candidates
By: The Hot Seat
Tags: 2020 Presidential Race, Ballot Order, Arkansas, 3rd Party

My interest in the Prohibition Party is well-documented and it actually started a few years ago because of a weird outlier I noticed while going through 2016 election data. 3rd parties had a great year between Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Jill Stein but in Arkansas county, Arkansas, someone else came in third place. It was a random Independent I had never heard of called James Hedges, who turned out to be the Prohibition Party candidate. And Arkansas county wasn’t the only one with weird results for minor parties which seemed to vary wildly from county to county.

That’s actually because Arkansas has an obscure election rule outlined in this news clip where each county has a random ballot order that is decided by chance with campaigns drawing lots. There has been a lot of different research on ballot order but they all seem to focus on the choice in low info elections or placement in primaries, or even propositions. There has been some for primetime general elections but even those focus on the major party effects, finding an impact though it was muted. All of these are fascinating and probably of more help to the major players, which is why they’ve received attention.

As an obsessive into the most niche and useless of issues, I wanted to instead look at the impact of ballot order on the most minor of candidates, those running for third parties and Independents, with no resources and only a ballot line (or the same name as a famous singer). This analysis chooses to focus on Arkansas because while other states like Texas have similar laws, Arkansas has relaxed enough standards to allow more candidates to make the ballot and in 2020, there were a total of 13 people on the ballot. What I’ve found is likely to be of more help to those parties when deciding where to do outreach but I’ve also found several instances where the behavior of the protest (or almost protest) voter is revealed and how people make their decision when they step into the voting booth.

The Candidates

The cup runneth over for choices available to Arkansas voters last cycle. Besides Biden and Trump, there were a lot of other candidates and for the most part, they did about the same. The screenshot below from uselectionatlas.org has all the results. If you don’t care about the biographies of the third-party candidate, skip ahead to the next section.

The options in order of performance were:

Jorgenson/Cohen: The Libertarian ticket this cycle was more left-leaning then in the past, with an emphasis on BLM messaging and anti-police. Jorgenson was the 1996 VP candidate to Harry Browne for the third time the party was on all 50 states. Her VP this time was originally on the ticket at the convention with meme candidate Vermin Supreme and had an outrageous platform (Personal note: I disagree with the linked article) that was moderated for the general.

West/Tidball: On the ballot in a few states largely due to ratfucking efforts by GOP consultants, the famous rapper is a mishmash of ideas and held only one unhinged event during the cycle. Following a pro-life turn, his vice-presidential pick was biblical life coach Michelle Tidball.

Hawkins/Walker: The Green Party wasn’t on every state, largely due to the pandemic, but it remains America’s 4th most serious party. After a heavy-handed primary that saw several splinters near the end, Hawkins chose Walker and neither one of them are officially GP members, steering the party in an explicitly Eco socialist direction. Hawkins and West were both targeted on signatures by Democrats to remove them from the ballot in several states.

Collins/Joe Parker: No, this is not the singer who singlehandedly made Tarzan a memorable film for everyone my age. Phil Collins is the name of the Prohibition Party nominee, and his personal belief system is that on the religious right, a shift from last cycles liberal views held by Hedges. Collins was a town council member in Libertyville, IL and ran for Mayor of Las Vegas as a Republican recently. Billy Joe Parker is a Georgia man who hates both alcohol and socialism referring to them as “human captivity” and this pairing was actually the third iteration of the Prohibition ticket after the last two in line to be nominees dropped out, which will matter later.

Pierce/Ballard: Brock Pierce was a child actor from The Mighty Ducks who struck it rich in cryptocurrency and is now an entrepreneur. A lot of times you get these random people with a lot of cash and advisors willing to take that cash and they get on a few ballots or see some “polls” and never end up running. Pierce was on the ballot in the easier dozen plus and a write-in in about a dozen more, though he did do a lot of media hits. Ballard, a direct descendent of Aaron Burr, is another tech entrepreneur and made BLM a focus of her campaign.

Blankenship/Mohr: In a minor party field filled with easily meme-able candidates, Blankenship provided some stiff competition. The ex-coal company CEO allegedly responsible for a mine explosion who turned his anti-establishment rhetoric into an anti-Mitch McConnell Senate run in West Virginia barely spent any cash and no attention on this race and it’s unclear why he ran in the first place. As an outsider, he caused a lot of state parties to pick other slates and he wasn’t as effective as past nominees in shutting down other right wing minor parties like the American Solidarity Party from choosing other candidates. William Mohr is an ex-Republican who joined the Constitution Party’s Michigan branch called the US Taxpayer’s Party in 2005 and has since run in several cycles for local and state house races. They both have moustaches.

Carroll/Patel: An evangelical party first and foremost, the American Solidarity Party puts stopping abortion first and foremost. They are also anti-COVID measures, but the party struggles with a strong wing that cozies a bit up to misogyny and racism but this cycle saw two “establishment” party members come on board between Brian Carroll and former Chair Amar Patel.

Gammon/Collins: C L Gammon was the VP of the original Prohibition Party ticket with Bill Bayes. Bayes, after being the 2016 VP nominee, was ousted by the party committee for neo-Confederate views. Gammon, a historical author and collector like several of the members of the party, had health issues so he had to drop out though he was stuck on the ballot in Arkansas. His VP pick, Phill Collins, is talked about above as the new ticket was also admitted.

Myers/Lusk: Myers is a frequent Alaska candidate but used to be a member of the Constitution Party and Alaskan Independence Party, having run in 2016 for VP of the former with no luck. He considers himself a Reagan Republican. Having split off, Life and Liberty is a brand-new right-wing party focused on ending abortion but also GMOs and the environment. Tiara Lusk is a pro-marijuana Idahoan and went from the Republican Party in 2018 to the Constitution Party as a delegate up to the 2020 convention where she left and joined this ticket. Arkansas is the only state that they received votes in.

La Riva/Freeman: The Party of Socialism and Liberation is a communist party established in 2004 that has a party organization and has nominated La Riva as their nominee in every cycle it has existed with the exception of 2012, though she was a stand-in in some states. She is a perennial candidate and was the VP nominee in the Worker’s World Party for decades before. Her VP nominee was officially Leonard Peltier, a Native American civil rights activist imprisoned since 1977 for the murder of FBI agents during a shooting. He dropped out to due health reasons so Sunil Freeman is acting as a placeholder. With more ballot access, their vote share stayed the same since 2016 and a slightly larger number of votes.

De la Fuente/Richardson: A man singularly bent on running for office as many times in as many states as humanly possible, Roque De La Fuente and now his sons constantly file for offices across the nation at all levels with all different parties. De La Fuente is independently wealthy and uses the attention from running to promote a message of equality and the need to fix ballot access laws.

Process for Finding the Order and The Lucky Draw:

Finding the actual ballot order was way more difficult than I thought it would be. Some states just have it online but Arkansas decided to make everything way more difficult. I was able to find some screenshots in local news reports but for a lot of them I had to use VoterView. With this site, have to put in a first name, a last name, and a date of birth for a registered voter to look up their absentee status and at the bottom of most pages, a pdf with their sample ballot. To find a registered voter, I would google a generic name in google with the county name and then click on one of those sites where you can see someone’s basic information but need to pay for more. I would then plug in those names into the VoterView. On 18 of the counties, there were no pdf links and I need to reach out to the county clerks and will update everything when I get them.

For the remaining 57 counties, plus most of Clay county, I was able to track down the ballot order for all 13 candidates and for the sake of helping others also look at possible effects, I have published a Google Sheet with the order and the performance for every candidate right here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CLZguyNcukuMUiJaO3bC6RBYmbLMau6I0kC1QiIfqBg/edit?usp=sharing.

I’ve visualized this below by showing each candidate’s instances that they hit each order on the ballot from left to right on their statewide performance. The bar chart under that shows the average order.

I was hoping to initially find something here where maybe the lowest average order or maybe who was getting 1st in the order more would help. However, it looks like each candidate had a wide range of orders but there was no correlation on the surface. Some candidates seemed to be less lucky than others coming in near the end while others had a good mix. If I wanted to see ballot order effects, I would have to go a bit deeper.

Page Effect Factor

The first plot was a simple one, taking the order for each candidate and then making a box and whisker plot for their raw share of the vote. This chart and all others are available and interactive at this link, and you can use them to filter by candidate if you wish:

This chart is immediately illuminating. My initial thoughts going into this would be that third party candidates would do better starting in first place and then gradually decline as they went further down the list. This is not what happened but there are instead a few things that other factors that stand out. First place does seem to give a boost but it’s not as large as I would have anticipated. Additionally, while there is downward trend after 1st place, it is not smooth and there is a large surge starting with being 10th. This pattern actually does make sense when you consider what the ballots look like. While the vast majority of the examples I looked up were the absentee ballot, the in person voting machines had a different setup. Unable to fit every candidate on one page for the electronic voting machines, I was able to find two different setups. Unfortunately, I was only able to find these for a few counties and I would love to do more to get a real divide. The different versions are below:

The first version seemed to be the most common where everything was on 2 pages, with the top 6 going first and the last seven on the next page. People read left to right and the first plot bears that out. If you scroll back up, and on future plots, you can see that the drop from an even to an odd number is less than the other way around. For instance, being in 5th has no difference or a slight improvement from being in 4th place.

The other setup for the voting machine is a four-page display like the one seen above. In this configuration, there are three candidates on each page but the last page has the final four. This would seem to explain why there is a large advantage for being in 10th through 13th but also why the interquartile range (the shaded in “box” part of the plot) is so large: some counties had this setup to help the final 4 and the others didn’t.

Just looking at the totals is informative but there is an issue where some third parties just did better statewide so the comparisons don’t help. For instance, Libertarian Jo Jorgenson received over 1% but several candidates received only a tenth of that. To adjust for that, I made a measure called relative share that is just the comparison for a county to statewide that is even across the board. For instance, if Kanye West, who got .34% statewide, received .45% in a county then the output would be (.0045-.0034)/.0034 = .324. And if the candidate did worse in a county than they did statewide, then that number would be negative. The plot below has the order by this new relative measure.

The trend is very similar to the first plot but I like that it provides a zero baseline and also provides a starker divide. This also clearly shows the IQR range in the middle better and how being in 1st and on the last page near the end is the place to best guaranteed to have a better result with a slump in the middle. Being on the left, with the exception of the 9–10 transition, still appears to be there. This didn’t show up in the first plot but being 7th in the order, which would be the first on the second page of a two-page ballot, is the most of the middle six worst ones. The natural drop for being in the middle of the page and for being on the right on the two page display means that 12th place was still lower here even though it was on the last page.

Election Day Factor

The next factor I wanted to check out because of the voting machines is whether or not there was an impact of people voting in person or by absentee where there were no page breaks. Unfortunately, Arkansas was a heavy in person state and any future look at this factor should pick a different state to really break it down. The below chart shows how much of each candidate’s vote came from each method of voting and sorted by Election Day share.

Source: Arkansas Secretary of State’s website

Both of the major party candidates had the lowest share of their voters on election day and generally third-party candidates got more votes on Election Day. This did not translate to all in person votes (Election Day + Early Vote) for third parties but Biden’s voters were much more likely to vote absentee.

Since we know that there is a page effect for in person voting, it would make sense to look if the voting behavior was different if you went in person on a machine or received an absentee ballot that had everyone’s name on the same sheet in order where you could see it. For this, I broke the counties up into three fairly equal categories: If in-person totals for a county was larger than 93.5%, it was marked as “High”, and below 90% was called “Low.” Anything in between is “Medium.” Now there isn’t a large difference there and any further research should look at specific methods in a more specific way, such as by precinct, which would be the next step. The chart below looks at the page adjusted effect with the counties sorted out by the amount that voted in person. On the y-axis is the mean adjusted difference which is a way of showing relative share garnered by a candidate. For instance, if a candidate received .4% statewide but .6% in the county, this would be (.6-.4)/.4=1.5.

The bonus for being first was much higher for absentee-heavy counties than it was for the other counties but being the last option provided a huge boost for high in person turnout counties. It’s also interesting that the penalty for being in 4th through 6th was more when in person turnout was up meaning voters tend not to linger on the names in the middle or spend time on the middle pages in the voting booth. If we reduce the number of candidates to only the most minor parties by removing Jo Jorgenson, Howie Hawkins, and Kanye West, you get the chart below:

Like the relative performance plot from earlier, being in first and on the last page had a marginally higher effect but it does not appear to be separated too much by whether the county was high or low turnout more than anything else.

Major Party Placement Factor

The last factor to look at is what the impact was of where Joe Biden and Donald Trump were on the ballot. Now to be honest, I wasn’t actually keeping track of this and wasn’t even planning to look at it but then I got intrigued that I could be missing something. For this, I added up the order of placement so if Trump was 4th and Biden was 6th, the total would be 10, then divided this as best as I could. If the total was less than 12, it would mean at least one was on page 1 if not both and that label was “High” for high up on the list. If the total was over 18, then the tag was “Bottom”, indicating that they were near the end. Anything in between was “Mid.” The chart below shows the page effect in order with each color being a different Trump and Biden placement. Further research should probably look at whether they were close together or spread out.

Overall, the effect of being on the first page seems muted when Trump and Biden are high up but being 1st place now no longer brings the same advantage. Additionally, when Biden and Trump appear near the front, there is a massive bump for being in last place and especially on the last page when it’s broken up into 4 from 10th to 13th in order. This would seem to indicate that if a voter goes through all the pages and passed Trump and Biden awhile back, they are unlikely to go back to find them.

Conclusion:

In the end, third party candidates do better when the protest option is better than the major candidates and a lot of times this can be borne just out of laziness. Being the first name that gets seen, or going to the last page of the voting machine and not seeing other options makes up a not insignificant portion of third-party votes. If you are a minor party on a ballot that uses this method to decide the order, it would be best to use your limited resources in counties where a bit of name recognition coupled with ballot order can boost your vote totals. Look to see if you’re in the Top 2, on the last page, and where the major party candidates are on the ballot as well as trying to guess Election Day turnout to hone in your strategy. When you are a very, very minor candidate, there may not be much to distinguish you from other candidates here is an edge to perform better and maximize your votes.