American Elections Are Unfair

Unfortunately, unfairness is baked in

As the title says, elections in America are unfair; they have been for a long time.

This is just a fact, and you may be surprised to learn that it’s actually not a very controversial one. That America’s elections are unfair has been supported in court and in numerous scholarly publications that few experts, if any, seriously believe to be in error. The wealth of support for this contention is matched only by the taboo on saying it. So I’ll show it.

Before launching into the nature of the problem, it should be noted that elections aren’t unfair in every state. Here’s a map that helps:

Note: Some states on this map are out-of-date. I used a source that contained all laws as of 2006 for everywhere but Pennsylvania and Louisiana, which I found were unfair in the current year. Most states remain structurally unfair as of 2024. Also note that the states marks Fair still have plenty of unfair elections at very local levels

If you read the caption for that map, you might now grasp what I mean when I say the elections are unfair. It’s not that the voting boxes are stuffed or that the machines send votes to the wrong candidates or that the ballots are designed in an abstruse way that systematically disfavors one or another party. The issue at hand is how the order of candidates shows up on ballots.

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In some states, ballot order goes by the alphabetical order of candidates by surname. This is a surprisingly common practice, and it has resulted in something interesting: elected officials are systematically more likely to have names that appear earlier in the alphabet.

Edwards 2015, Figure 1

People with alphabetically earlier names are by no means more competent than those with later names, the fact that they appear earlier on ballots just gives them an unfair advantage because lots of voters are ignorant about who they’re voting for. Voters are generally not required to mark every slot on ballots, but they still feel compelled to, and when they don’t know the candidates, they’re more likely to vote for the one that shows up first. We know this is true because some states have adopted random ballot orders across counties. For example, here are the percentage deviations generated by ballot order effects across 24 different elections in Texas circa 2014:

Grant 2017, Fig. 2

The effects of ballot order in these primaries are generally symmetrical. They are also generally small for elections for more popular positions. But for the less popular positions that nevertheless matter, where someone shows up on the ballot often has a simply enormous effect. This effect is so large it makes elections unfair. Imagine, for a moment, if the current presidential election swung four points because of a silly order bias. No one would accept that, because it would determine the president. That is what determines how thousands of elections across the U.S. are filled each year.

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Some of this “unfairness” is worse than in other places. In some places, a party is explicitly favored and gets ordered first. In others, a party coincidentally gets ordered first because the party’s name comes earlier alphabetically. In yet others, incumbents are advantaged in various ways.

The incumbent ballot order advantage is very common, and it manifests in different ways. The winner of the previous gubernatorial, secretary of state, or presidential election in a given state is often placed first on the ballot. In one case, the worst performer goes first. In general, then, American elections favor incumbents structurally, and not just by dint of incumbent name and achievement recognition.

If you dislike the two-party system in the U.S., then listen up: In a lot of cases, major parties are preferentially ordered and then the minor parties are (Libertarians, Green, Reform, etc.) ordered after them. In other words, minor parties are systematically disfavored, making it less and less likely that they become major parties or in any way real contenders.

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Unfair ballot order rules are a real problem for American democracy, but they really shouldn’t be. It is trivial to fix the issue. For example, it took me about a minute to make a script that takes names for and prints them out in a list with randomized order. If you’re using electronic voting, this is a no-brainer: the order should always be randomized at the individual level. If you’re using printed ballots, this is still a no-brainer, because it’s not hard to print ballots with different orders. There really is no excuse for this phenomenon to exist given how unfair it is and how easy it is to remedy.

I suspect the persistence of unfair ballot ordering practices has to do with something simple that isn’t just biased interest in keeping it around. When I’ve discussed this with people, one of the most common responses has been to doubt that ballot order matters. I think it might be that simple: elections aren’t reformed to eliminate this source of bias, because people don’t believe it’s real and meaningful, even when it swings thousands of elections each year by large enough margins to determine the winner. And yes, very local positions do matter.

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Election Unfairness is Multidimensional

Ballot order is a very obvious, practically uncontestable form of election unfairness that continues to exist in the U.S. despite being easily fixable. In the 2024 election, it favors Democrats somewhat.

The Electoral College in a general sense favors Republicans, and some other things favor Democrats. For example, Census Bureau mistakes in 2020 took three electoral votes from red-leaning states and gave them to blue-leaning ones. Apportioning with the inclusion of the illegal immigrant population also introduces bias. The small amount of known fraud cases also tend to favor Democrats.

But a potentially more important thing that makes elections unfair is common between the U.S. and places considered to be corrupt like Hungary and Belarus: the media environment is imbalanced. America sometimes has media conspiracies, where collusion happens to advance a given candidate, within the media, by directive from media owners, or worse, with campaigns and government officials. The Twitter Files contain examples of this. But more often, the media engages in prospiracy:

What distinguishes prospiracies from conspiracies is that the members don’t necessarily know they are members, nor are they fully conscious of what binds them together. Prospiracies are not created through oaths sworn by guttering torchlight, but by shared ideology or institutional culture. In many cases, members accept the prospiracy’s goals and values without thinking through their consequences as fully as they might if the process of joining were formal and initiatory.

Members of the media share backgrounds, pedigrees, beliefs, experiences, locations, and more; it should not surprise anyone that they coordinate without needing to be coordinated, that they share lines and pick up what their peers put down. Since they dominate media numerically and fairness in broadcasting hasn’t been practiced in decades, they collude in favor of electing Democrats, and this makes elections less fair.

Intimidation also favors Democrats for this reason. People are influenced into thinking if this or that is acceptable by what goes on the TV and over the airwaves, and if support for a given candidate is taboo, early voting, mail-in ballots, and ballot harvesting can become influence operations that push voters towards submitting votes for candidates they don’t really support. This concern seems to have been recognized by the Harris campaign in the last days of this election, in the form of advertisements telling people to lie to their spouses and communities in favor of Harris, when there’s pressure to vote Trump. The realism of the depictions can be debated, but the fact that voters are frequently intimidated cannot.

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Elections Currently Promote Uninformed Voting

Beyond elections being unfair, the ways they’re set up also promote stupidity. Some states, like Michigan, have straight-ballot voting, where you can tick a box and you’ll endorse every candidate from a given party. This is polluted by the ballot order effect, but it’s also just a disagreeable practice in general, because it encourages people to be uninformed about what different candidates believe and endorse, and how they act. In the real world, it is not always best to vote Democrat or Republican, so straight-ticket voting is a perverse thing to include on tickets.

Another thing that should probably be regarded as perverse is listing parties next to candidates. This may sound controversial, but it’s the same concern one might have with straight-ticket voting: voters should know who they’re voting for, not just which party they represent. Again, party is not a reliable enough indication of rightness or agreement with voters, so this practice only serves to allow voters to encourage voters to remain ignorant about the candidates slated to represent them.

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Reform is Easy; Reform Must Happen

It is trivial to make elections secure, to make their results so believable that contesting them is not credible, and to make them much less biased in fact. This should be someone’s goal, too. If you care about the preservation and operation of democracy—which is vitally dependent on the perception of legitimacy—then you should promote things that make it appear to be legitimate, like when European nations dropped mail-in ballots and adopted strict voter ID requirements.

The case against making elections unbiased and secure, without results vitiated by ballot order effects and other sources of unnecessary movement in performance, is, frankly, weak-to-nonexistent. The only real argument that stands out is that requiring voter ID prevents some number of people from voting. But so what? Election legitimacy matters more, and this is not a real hurdle for virtually anyone who would have voted in the first place. If you cannot support secure elections because some number of people will be disenfranchised due to their own incompetence in acquiring an ID, then support a national ID. It’s that simple, and if America is to have secure elections that practically everyone can agree are legitimate, ensuring its democracy persists without being threatened by doubt, then it must be done.