Brian Rudman: Random idea beats ardvaarks, donkeys

Auckland Super City logo. Photo / Supplied

Opinion

The Counties Manukau District Health Board voted earlier this year to list candidates' names randomly on the ballot paper for this year's elections.

Michael Williams, who under the traditional alphabetical listing of candidates would have come last on the voting paper, moved the motion. Don Barker, who the experts say had a lot to risk by giving away his traditional place near the top of the list, seconded it sportingly.

Mr Barker laughed off the suggestion that he acted nobly. "I don't believe your position on the ballot paper helps. We've had Bob Wichman and he's been re-elected three times, just as I have."

He mightn't believe it but plenty of academics beg to differ, claiming candidates at the top of the ballot paper list, particularly when the list is long, have a significant advantage over those further down.

Mr Barker admitted his vote did go down at the last election, when the district health board introduced randomised listing, but he puts that down to other factors. It's not just the researchers who would suggest otherwise.

Even the best intentioned of voters, and I include myself here, starts to lose interest when faced with the long and intimidating list of unknowns that is the traditional DHB ballot paper. It stands to reason that those towards the bottom of the list are going to suffer.

In Mr Barker's case, he's vying for one of seven seats against 23 other contenders in this year's poll. Across town, 33 are seeking the seven seats on the Waitemata DHB.

And in the Super City elections, all the local boards are being hotly contested, with as many as 32 seeking the eight seats at Manurewa and 28 seeking eight seats in both Eden/Albert and Hibiscus Coast.

If candidates were standing on recognisable tickets, at least voters would get a hint about where people stood. But most are under the meaningless tag of "Independent".

In Australia, the "donkey vote" advantage, favouring candidates at the beginning and end of the list, is well acknowledged. There, voters not only have to grade candidates in order of preference but they also have to vote, fullstop.

That forces people to the ballot box, where the temptation for some is to pick a few names at the top of the page or protest by just numbering down the list from the top.

Last week, Brian Costar, head of the Democratic Audit of Australia, told the Australian he estimated that 2 per cent of all votes were "donkeys". To counter this, the order of candidates on Australian ballot papers is decided not by alphabet but by an official draw.

According to the Australian, "in an election where every vote could count, Coalition candidates [in last weekend's election] have drawn higher positions on the ballot paper than Labor in 10 key marginals".

The Australian system doesn't eliminate the donkey vote advantage, it just randomises it so that the Aardvarks don't automatically get the best starting position.

In the 2007 DHB elections, the Otago DHB introduced true randomisation, using computerised printing to ensure the list on each individual ballot paper was randomly sorted. This ensured that every candidate was at the top on an equal number of ballot papers.

It was introduced after board chairman Richard Thompson compared the results of the 2004 elections of the five New Zealand health boards that listed candidates randomly with the 16 that used alphabetical listing. His findings were remarkable.

"If your name was Atholl the Aardvark," he wrote, "you had more than twice as much chance of being elected in an alphabetical listing than poor old Rocky the Raccoon."

He calculated that the average chance of winning was 29 per cent but if your name started with "A" you had a 53 per cent chance of winning compared with a Thompson like himself, who had a 21 per cent chance.

The Local Government Commission agrees there is a problem. In its July 2008 review of the Local Electoral Act, the commission acknowledged that its analysis of the 2007 elections "did show that the order of candidates on the voting document had an impact on election outcomes.

"Candidates whose names were early in the alphabet (and therefore early in the candidates' profiles booklet) and early on alphabetically ordered voting documents were up to 4 per cent more likely to be elected than those whose names were later in the alphabet."

It also found "there was a significant bias in favour of candidates in the left column of voting documents when there was more than one column of candidates".

But the commissioners called for more research, concluding "a definitive solution to this issue is unlikely". When I checked this week, no more research had been done.

With modern systems of printing, randomising ballot papers is not a difficult task. If it helps eliminate bias in the election process then surely it should be adopted.

Either that or scrap the lengthy lists that cause the problem and create more single-member, locally based, wards.