North Okanagan residents call for randomized ballots in next municipal election

Sue Young is not running in the next municipal election in Vernon, B.C., but as a voter she's concerned about the disadvantages posed to some candidates if they were listed on ballots in alphabetical order by their last name.

So at a city council meeting on Monday, Young represented a group of concerned citizens in the North Okanagan community to call for the randomization of candidates on the ballot list.

"Now is the time to do it — obviously a bias towards people with names at the beginning of the alphabet is not a good way to run an election," Young told CBC Daybreak South host Chris Walker.

According to B.C.'s Local Government Act, candidates running in municipal elections across the province must be listed alphabetically by surname on ballots, unless a municipality implements the change.

Young says her group was inspired by Vancouver's experience with randomized ballot lists in the October 2018 municipal election.

In June that year, Vancouver city council voted to randomize the order of candidates on local civic election ballots, following concerns that an alphabetical order may work against candidates with East Asian, South Asian or Latino last names, where initials are often not at the top of the alphabet.

A few months later in September, Vancouver city staff conducted a draft lottery — drawing folded papers printed with candidate names — to determine the ballot order of 21 mayoral candidates, 71 councillor candidates, 33 trustee candidates and 33 park commissioner candidates for the Oct. 20, 2018 election.

The City of Vancouver recommended council in December 2020 to continue with the random ballot order for the municipal election in 2022, based on findings from two Simon Fraser University researchers commissioned by city staff after studying Vancouver election results from 1988 to 2018.

The findings indicate that candidates for councillors, trustees and park commissioners listed lower on the ballots generally received fewer votes compared to candidates listed higher on the ballot. However, this effect did not exist in mayoral candidates.

Vancouver's chief election officer Rosemary Hagiwara says although city staff realize a randomized list may not help reduce the ballot order effect, they still recommend it because it is perceived to be fairer than an alphabetical one.

She also says council is calling for a numbered candidate list on ballots for better readability, while city staff is calling for the extension of what's currently a 10-day candidate nomination period.

"[There are] a lot of candidates to get to know, [so] having a longer period would help them become familiar with the candidates," she said.

The ballot change request to the City of Vernon does not include numbering the list or extending the nomination period.

City of Vernon spokesperson Christy Poirier told CBC in an email statement that council will discuss on Nov. 8 the feasibility of creating a randomized ballot for the next municipal election, although the councillor byelection on Dec. 4 will stick to an alphabetical ballot.