The Californian Alphabet

In 2003, a special recall election was held in the state of California to replace Governor Gray Davis. We all know how this ended: actor Arnold Schwarzenegger (star of such conveniently-titled films as "The Running Man" and "Total Recall"), won the election with a plurality of the vote.

As there was no time for primaries to be held, hundreds jumped into the race and each candidate who met the qualifications had to be listed on the final ballot. However, a law on the books in California mandates that, rather than listing candidates alphabetically, a new alphabetical order must be made up from scratch by holding a 'lottery'-type drawing in which the order in which the 26 letters selected would become the new alphabetical index for that election. This was done in order to combat the suspicion that a candidate has an advantage by being listed first on the ballot, despite the findings of several studies that this perceived bias does not exist.

The 2003 recall alphabet was as follows: R, W, Q, O, J, M, V, A, H, B, S, G, Z, X, N, T, C, I, E, K, U, P, D, Y, F, and L.

Now, according to California's own reasons for this law, any order would give one candidate an advantage, as any list has to have a first entry. In this case, David Laughing Horse Robinson would be listed at the top and Gary Leonard would have the misfortune of being at the tail end. Well, not so. The list would be 'rotated' from district to district, so that each district's ballot would start with a different candidate. Why the latter part of this process cannot be instituted without re-arranging the alphabetical order is still unexplained.