Decades later, scheme backfires
Maxwell: Gov. DeSantis wants to keep alive a nearly 70-year-old plan intended to rig elections.
Nearly 70 years ago, Democrats in Florida came up with a devilishly ingenious way to rig election ballots in their favor.
Instead of listing candidates’ names in alphabetical order, they passed a law that allowed Democrats to be listed first.
Why does that matter? Because there’s an advantage to being listed first. It scores you more votes.
Not among the savviest and most informed voters. But among voters who aren’t really sure who they like. Research shows that being listed first can be worth a 1to 5-point bump in results.
That’s not a giant amount, but it’s more than enough to determine a winner in a close race — the likes of which Florida often has. (Just look at Rick Scott, who won all three of his races by 1.2 percentage points or less.) Studies show the advantage is even greater in down-ballot races where voters don’t know the candidates as well.
So in 1951, Florida Democrats found a way to make sure their candidates’ names received that advantage — by passing a law that said the candidates in the sitting governor’s party always got to go first. That seemed like a safe bet for Democrats back then since the state had elected Democratic governors for three straight decades.
Except things changed. Republicans found their footing, winning the governor’s race in 1986, again in 1998 and then every race since for the last two decades.
When I first learned about the Democrats’ scheme blowing up in their face, I thought it was kind of funny — like the party hacks were getting what they deserved.
But last week, a federal judge said: That’s not how Democracy works. Judge Mark Walker ruled that no party should be able to play games with “free and fair elections.”
Walker said that 1950s Democratic party hacks weren’t the ones getting punished — that modern-day candidates and voters are, including many who weren’t even alive back then.
That’s one of the points made by the Democratic plaintiffs who filed the case, including Orlando resident Nancy Jacobson.
“I wasn’t even living in Florida when this happened,” said Jacobson, a Democratic voter and donor who joined national Democrats in filing the lawsuit. “I wasn’t even aware of this until recently.”
I wasn’t either. Not until last year when a reader asked why Rick Scott’s name was listed before Bill Nelson’s in the U.S. Senate race. (Unless “Sesame Street” was wrong all those years, both the reader and I were pretty sure