...not everything is a conspiracy.

I saw this video this morning posted by a voter in Montana who received his mail-in ballot, noticed that the Democratic candidate in every race appeared dead last on the list of candidates and decided to do some research.

YouTube: My Ballot Made Me Angry (vlogbrothers)

His first concern, knowing that ignorant voters who know nothing about a particular race often just select the first name and knowing that conniving politicians might take advantage of this, was that it was a consistent pattern in his heavily Republican state. After doing some digging, he found a much better, but more complex, explanation.

In Montana, the people running elections ARE very much aware of the unfairness of this "first name" bias so they have gone to great lengths to mix name sequencing across the state. In fact, the order of appearance of all national and state-wide office candidates is shuffled across all districts in the state so no candidate is atop the list across the entire state. Given a slate of candidates A, B, C and D in last-name alphabetical order, the ballots are printed with ABCD, BCDA, CDAB, DABC sequencing across district 1, 2, 3, 4 and the rotation repeats across all districts.

The key point he makes? It's not that everything is a conspiracy when you don't KNOW anything, it's that everything is a conspiracy when you don't TRUST anything. As he summarizes,

We don't have this system where we make sure that everybody gets an equal amount of time on the top, thus trying to negate some of these ballot order effects, because magically everything is perfect. We have it because somebody looked at the old system and thought "That doesn't seem fair" and they did SCIENCE to confirm that in fact it was not fair and then they did policy to make it so that is was more fair.

America has been voting for a long time. There are still some horrendous flaws in our processes, one of them driven by the Constitution itself in the form of the Electoral College, but the actual vote COLLECTION process reflects decades of knowledge about minimizing the risk of corruption that the average person has never thought about. EXAMPLE: Most states make it illegal to take a picture of your completed ballot. Why? To ensure the integrity of the anonymous ballot and ensure a voter isn't using the photo to prove to another party how they voted to collect a bribe for voting a particular way.

Changes to voting processes are fine as long as they are being pursued and explained in public. If there are aspects to current processes you don't understand or trust, "use the Google" and consult more than one source to determine why those processes are implemented the way they are before leaping to the easiest, most simplistic conclusion.

WTH