On March 24, the Cranbury Democratic Committee voted unanimously to support the “Better Ballots NJ” initiative organized by the non-partisan group Good Government Coalition of New Jersey.
Here’s why we signed on:
The way the NJ election primary ballots are configured is broken which makes the system less fair. We want every vote to count, so we want every county to use ballots that are easier to read and organized properly so there is no visual favoritism of candidates.
Here’s what the problem is:
In NJ primary elections, we use a ballot system that lines candidates up in columns, but if you aren’t one of the main people selected by a small group in your party, you get put in a different column. This is often called being in “ballot Siberia.”
People tend to vote down the main column without thinking. It’s a simple psychological and visual tendency. Plus the county line is one of the first two columns and it is usually topped by the best-known candidates like presidential or senatorial candidates whose names people know.
The unfortunate result is that candidates who are not selected by the party’s small county organizing committees to be “on the line” (which just means “in the main column”) are much less likely to ever win in the primary and then they rarely go on to compete in the general elections.
Here’s why it matters:
Again and again, up-and-coming candidates or ones with unusual or new perspectives get passed over for “the line” by the organizing groups who often stick with folks who they’ve gotten to know better.
“It’s basically become getting the county line has become synonymous with winning the election,” says Brett Pugach, an election law attorney with Bromberg Law LLC who has written on the topic.
The “party line” system makes it so the average voter ends up having much less impact on the outcome than normal on the election, essentially chipping away at democracy.
CHECK OUT THE IMAGE BELOW TO SEE WHAT WE MEAN
The people on this ballot are all Democrats running for different positions in a primary, but the one in Column F has almost no chance of winning and moving on to the main election compared to their competitors in Column B.
The folks in the easy-to-spot Column B are most likely to win, even if the voter knows little about many of them, because visually people are more prone to voting straight down a line. (You can click here or on the image to download a copy that’s easier to read).
Here’s how we fix the problem:
Fortunately, it’s easy to fix this problem by simply changing how the ballots are set up visually, and it’s how other states do it, so we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
We support using a system where candidates are arranged under each seat in one of two ways: Either randomly draw names with the first chosen getting the top spot and the second underneath, and so forth, or rotating the names so that each person gets top spot or second or third in a different district or ward.
Some counties in NJ have moved to this system already, but it needs to be the whole state. Below are two examples from Hunterdon and Passaic counties. (Click here to download a slightly clearer version. Image courtesy of NJSpotlight News.)
It’s not complicated. It boils down to one thing: make clearer ballots where no candidate is given a preferred position.