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 be

American Elections Are Unfair - Cremieux Recueil

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2024-11-05 08:00:03

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:

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.

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.