When I was eight years old, I accompanied my grandpa (Papa) to the polls for the 2012 general election. This was the first time I ever "voted." I remember watching him get his ballot and going with him into the voting booth. He had a list with him of the candidates he wanted to vote for. However, once he got to the local elections, he started asking me which name looked better. Whichever name I said, he voted for.
Now that I am voting in my first election, I’ve been thinking about that day. My papa, at some point, stopped knowing who he wanted to vote for and did not care to learn, trusting my eight-year-old self to make as good of a decision as his 62-year-old brain. I honestly don’t blame him. As a Los Angeles county voter, my ballot this election cycle is nothing less than daunting: four pages, 13 ballot propositions (one local, two county, 10 state), three local elections, six county elections, the presidential election and I even had to vote for Adam Schiff twice (once to fill the rest of Diane Feinstein’s term, once for the normal six years as senator). That’s 25 different things to vote for. I was seriously tempted to play “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe” to choose some of those candidates, just to make my life easier.
The reality about voting is that people get tired. People get frustrated. People stop paying attention. I get it. The problem, though, is that we’ve normalized this type of voting behavior in our country. When we celebrate ⅔ of eligible voters turning out as the highest in over 100 years, that’s not something to be proud of.
What makes it even worse is that decades worth of election literature shows that voters’ lack of stamina doesn’t just lead to low voter turnout — it actually biases our ballots. Since the 1990s, researchers have reliably found that voters go through “cognitive fatigue,” where people get so bogged down with information that they process slower, shorten their attention spans and become unfocused. When this happens, voters tend to experience a name-order effect: They are more likely to vote for whichever candidate’s name is written first. This effect is higher when a race does not have much media attention and when voters are less partisan, which means that state and local elections exhibit this effect more. When studied in primary elections, the name-order effect was large enough to affect the results of multiple races. In other words, some candidates may have actually won elections because their name was listed first on the ballot. Our voter laziness has the potential to bias a result so much that a candidate will win for that reason alone.
Similar effects have been found with ballot propositions. Researchers in the early 2000s found that the farther down a proposition appears on a ballot, the more likely it is that a person will not vote on it. Not only that, but the lower a ballot initiative is, the higher percentage of “No” votes it receives. The reason? Cognitive fatigue. This study, along with the previously mentioned primary election study, was conducted in areas where ballot orders are randomized by assembly district or precinct, which should minimize ballot bias. Yet, ballot bias effects still impact the results of elections.
Simply put, when voters are tired and don’t know who or what they want to vote for, they bias their ballots. They are more likely to vote for the first candidate they see, they are more likely to vote no on propositions and they are more likely to skip races. This is unacceptable.
The recent surge in absentee voting may be helping to lessen voter fatigue. With absentee ballots, voters have more time to understand their ballots, do their research and make informed decisions. Thirty six states now allow absentee ballots without an excuse, eight of which conduct their entire elections with mail-in ballots as the primary avenue. As previously mentioned, randomized ballots are expected to lessen name-order effects, so some states have chosen to implement this process. Unfortunately, neither of these fixes address the root of the ballot bias problem.
The simplest (albeit the most time consuming) way to de-bias your ballot is to do your research. Learn a little about each candidate, even though it might take you four hours (like it did for me). Find what rating the Bar Association gave for that random judge seat on your ballot. Yes, this takes an annoying amount of effort, but it is vital to our democracy.
Now, your job is to go learn about your candidates. Learn about your ballot measures. Make an educated decision, not one based on “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.” It’s time to get out there and make an informed vote.
