North Carolina ballot order sparks misleading claims of election interference

Kamala Harris is the first name North Carolina voters will see on their 2024 US election ballots, but conspiratorial social media posts claiming Democrats manipulated the polls to hurt Donald Trump's chances of winning back the White House are misleading. The order of candidates in the swing state was determined randomly by a draw of a bingo ball and a coin flip, in accordance with a law that saw Trump positioned higher in 2016 and 2020.

"Reports show Trump is poised to appear near the bottom of the ballot in North Carolina," says an August 27, 2024 post on X. "This is indefensible and a clear attempt at voter manipulation."

Similar posts alleging "voter manipulation" or dirty "tricks" spread across X and other platforms, such as YouTube, as the race between Democratic vice president Harris and former Republican president Trump heats up.

Fox News contributor Leo Terrell, a vocal Trump supporter, amplified the claims in an X post calling for a lawsuit.

Political scientists have long studied how the order of names on a ballot can affect the election's outcome, with the prevailing belief being that appearing first can help candidates perform better, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (archived here).

A sample North Carolina ballot for the 2024 contest does show Harris's name at the top and Trump's toward the bottom, ahead of only independent candidate Cornel West (archived here).

But the posts claiming voter manipulation are misleading. It was chance -- not election interference or a conspiracy -- that slotted Harris several spots above Trump.

A randomized process

North Carolina law requires the state's Board of Elections arrange the names of the candidates for an office in either alphabetical or reverse alphabetical order according to a randomized process (archived here).

"The order in which candidates shall appear on official ballots in any election ballot item shall be either alphabetical order or reverse alphabetical order by the last name of the candidate, which order shall be determined each election by drawing at the State Board after the closing of the filing period," the law says.

The order for the 2024 election was determined on December 15, 2023 using a two-step process that the state streamed live online (archived here and here).

First, a ball was drawn from a bingo machine to determine what letter would come first. Second, a coin flip decided whether the names would appear in alphabetical or reverse alphabetical order.

The letter selected was "D." Then the coin flip resulted in an alphabetical listing.

As a result, the candidates were to be organized by last name in an alphabetical order starting with "D" and ending with "C."

That sequence placed Harris's name first, followed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Chase Oliver, Jill Stein, Randall Terry, Trump and West. Kennedy remains on the ballot despite having dropped out because the state rejected his party's request to withdraw his name, given the millions of ballots already printed and looming start of absentee voting.

Had President Joe Biden not bowed out of the race in July and endorsed Harris, he would have been last on the ballot.

"We have been conducting the random drawing this way or similarly for many years," Patrick Gannon, public information director for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, told AFP.

Gannon pointed to the state's law and press release announcing the results of the random draw, and also to sample ballots from 2020 and 2016 showing that Trump's name appeared first during both of those years (archived here and here).

Matthew Weil, executive director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Democracy Program, told AFP that North Carolina seems to have "followed its laws exactly as written" (archived here).

Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California-Los Angeles, agreed.

"It appears that North Carolina followed its usual rules on random assignment, and there’s nothing nefarious going on," he said (archived here).

Each state has different rules on how they determine the order of candidates, from various forms of randomization to ordering based on when candidates qualified for their ballots.

"Some states randomize, some randomize and rotate, some prioritize based upon the popularity of political parties," Hasen told AFP.

California, for example, randomly draws letters to create a new alphabet and uses that alphabet to determine the order of names (archived here). The letter "T" was drawn fourth in 2024, while "H" was drawn seventh, meaning Trump's name will come before Harris's on California ballots (archived here).

AFP has debunked other misinformation about the election here.