Fl.Judge: Candidates in governor's party need not go first on election ballots
TALLAHASSEE — Delivering a victory to Democrats, a federal judge Friday declared unconstitutional a decades-old Florida law that requires candidates who are in the same party as the governor to be listed first on the ballot.
Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker ruled that the state law “imposes a discriminatory burden on plaintiffs’ voting rights which is not of the same magnitude as entirely denying plaintiffs the franchise but is not negligible either.”
The effect of being the first candidate listed on the ballot - known as the “primacy effect” vote, the “windfall vote” or the “donkey vote” - is especially meaningful in Florida, where razor-thin margins are common in statewide elections.
“By systematically awarding a statistically significant advantage to the candidates of the party in power, Florida’s ballot order scheme takes a side in partisan elections,” the judge wrote.
The Constitution does not allow “a state to put its thumb on the scale and award an electoral advantage to the party in power” he added.
In Friday’s 74-page order, Walker relied in part on testimony from three expert witnesses who represented the plaintiffs, which include the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Governors Association, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, Priorities USA and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
For example, political scientist Jon Krosnick’s analysis of Florida elections from 1978 through 2016 found that first-listed candidates have historically gained an average advantage of 5 percentage points due to their ballot position, an effect that has less than a 1 percent probability of occurring by chance, Walker noted.
In a state with a “history of election results in which the margin of victory or defeat is less than three to five percentage points,” Walker wrote, the state law has impacted plaintiffs First and 14th Amendment rights “by systematically allocating that small but statistically significant advantage” to candidates of the same party as the last-elected governor.
https://www.newsherald.com/news/20191117/judge-candidates-in-governors-party-need-not-go-first-on-election-ballots