By Adam Pagnucco.
Part One introduced the premise of this series: the use of cast vote records to examine partisan differences in voting in the 2024 school board primary. Part Two looked at turnout by party. Part Three examined voting for school board incumbents by party. Now let’s look at ballot placement.
First, let’s restate the volume of research on ballot placement. Studies on voting in Denmark, Britain, Bavaria, North Dakota, California statewide general elections, California city and school board elections, the 2003 California governor recall election, New York City, the Greater London area and U.S. state legislature elections show a benefit to candidates who appear first or early on ballots. This is not just an urban myth, folks! And in races like school board elections where candidates usually have little if any money, the impact of ballot placement might be magnified.
Before looking at the data, let’s note that the percentages in this series are different than those reported by the State Board of Elections because the denominator here includes overvotes and undervotes, not just votes for candidates. Overvotes occur when a voter votes for more candidates than allowed (for example, voting for two people for just one seat). Undervotes occur when a voter does not cast a vote for that seat. Undervotes are very common in school board races. One of the advantages of using cast vote records, as this series does, is that they explicitly include overvotes and undervotes. So when overvotes and undervotes are included, the percentage received by any one candidate or groups of candidates is lower than when overvotes and undervotes are excluded.
Counting overvotes and undervotes, the three candidates appearing first on the ballot (Lynne Harris at-large, Brenda Diaz in District 2 and Shebra Evans in District 4) received 21% of all votes cast in the primary. (Excluding overvotes and undervotes, they received 27%). Here is how their combined vote was distributed by party.
Democrats and unaffiliated voters each cast more than 20% of their votes for top place candidates, driving the total results. Republicans were the outlier, casting just 15% of their votes for these candidates.
Let’s go further. The chart below shows the percentage of voters in each party who cast their votes ONLY for candidates at the top of the ballot in the three school board races.
These percentages are all tiny.
Why the difference? We saw in Part Three that ballot placement and incumbency overlapped since in two of the three races, the incumbents (Harris and Evans) also appeared first on the ballot. The advantage of incumbency was weak and some groups (notably Republicans) seemed outright hostile to incumbents. The one non-incumbent among the top place candidates, Diaz, almost finished first among GOP voters. So the difference between Diaz and the incumbents probably killed off any correlation among all three candidates.
If any candidate benefited from ballot placement, it was Diaz, who was not an incumbent, did not receive the coveted Apple Ballot endorsement and raised very little money. Harris and Evans may have also received a boost here. It’s notable that the only incumbent not at the top of the ballot, District 2’s Rebecca Smondrowski, finished third in her race.
Next: the Apple Ballot.