Good morning, John.  So I got my mail-in ballot this week, and there was something on it that made me pretty angry.

So I open up my ballot and I start going through it, and here are the three federal  elections that I get to vote in. There's five candidates for president.

The last  one listed is Kamala Harris, the Democrat. There's four for the Senate race. The last  one listed is the Democrat.

And there's three for the House race. The last one listed is  Monica Trinell, the Democrat. Now, if you're familiar with Montana, you know  that we are what they call a “red state”, and so the Republicans are generally in power here.  And so, my mind immediately thought to itself, is this something that the people in power are  doing specifically to give  themselves an advantage?  In all three of those, the Democrat is the last person on the list.

And this isn't, like, a thing  that doesn't matter. Decades ago, when California switched from listing incumbents first and then challengers  to ordering alphabetically, they were able to see  that there was an advantage of up to 5% to candidates listed first. That could, obviously,  easily sway a lot of races,  but it's, like, also kind of  not better to give advantage to people whose names just happen to be earlier in the alphabet.  So, what are you supposed to do about this?

I mean, maybe nothing. Maybe you could  just go alphabetical. Maybe you could let the election officials decide based on what they  want to do.

Well, actually, at least in Montana, you do something else. It's worth saying right  here that the United States  of America is the United States of America. Each state has their own laws, including their  own election laws, and each county has to comply with those laws, but within them,  they can be creative in all their own ways.  It's a weird way to do it,  but that's how we do it.  So how is it done here in Montana?

How do we determine our ballot order? Well, I'll tell you,  when I found out, I was relieved and had just a tiny bit of my faith restored,   and it all has to do with a code on my ballot that I actually can't  show you. But before we get to that, I have to tell you about something else.

We do surveys of the audience of this channel, and one thing that we see is that we vote more  than almost any group of people in America. Over 90% of the people who are eligible to vote,  who fill out that survey, vote. So most of you got this on lock, but for the ones who don't,  Vote.org lets you easily  check if you're registered,  figure out how to register if you're not, get a sample ballot so you know what's gonna be  on the ballot when you get to your polling place, or, if you're able to–  this is different, of course, in different states– figure out how to vote by mail,  which, if that's available to you, you should sign up to do it.

It's great. Don't let the  clout chasers on the Internet convince you that it doesn't matter, because, like, why else  would all of the richest people do it? They have lots of money and power, and yet,  they always show up to vote, almost like it's the one way in which they have the  exact same amount of power as everyone else.

But back to the code. Down here at the bottom of my ballot, which I'm not going to show you, there's a  code that's made up of two parts separated by a hyphen. The second part is my district,  which is quite small, and I don't want people  to know where I live with  that level of specificity.  So that's why I'm not telling you what the code is.

But the first part is the ballot–or  sequence–number. Let's look at one of them that's not mine. 17-HELG96. HELG96 is the  district, which is near to me, but not near enough that I'm worried about it.

And that's  important because we're not just voting in federal elections, and they have to send you  the right ballot with all  the right candidates on it,  including all the local ones. And which local election you vote in is determined by  where you live. Quite granularly, so granularly that I didn't want to show you my district.  But the sequence–or ballot–number is a separate thing.

Since every district–and there's  a ton of ‘em–is getting a different ballot anyway, the candidates on each ballot, it turns out,  are in a different order. To eliminate bias, the candidates are initially ordered in  alphabetical order, but  then it gets shifted by one  for every ballot in the sequence. So, weirdly, it’s actually not quite randomized–it’s  alphabetical order, but shifted for each district.

It's just, like, the top name goes on the bottom  and then the top name goes on the bottom and the top name goes on the bottom,  and it just rotates around like that. So in fact, even though my ballot has only Democrats  on the bottom, every candidate gets to be on the top an equal number of times. And if  we look at this sample ballot for HELG96, Kamala Harris is on top.

I tell you about this for, like, three reasons. First, I've seen this meme a few times  you've probably seen it, too–that “everything is a conspiracy theory if you don't know anything”.  But that's actually, I think, overly mean about it because that's not actually what's going on.  In fact, everything is a conspiracy theory when you don't trust anything. If I didn't have  any trust in the people who run the elections in Montana and I looked at this, I might run  out there and post something on social media being like, Montana's only putting Democrats  in the last spot.

And then maybe that would go viral, and then later there would be a  correction, but the correction wouldn't go viral, and a bunch of people would have further  lost faith in that system. And it would go viral because it would be confirming a bias that  we have, that the people who have power already want to hold onto that power. And that's, like,  the case, obviously.

In fact, that's why ballots used to have the incumbent first and then the  challengers after–the people who were in charge were the incumbents, so they put  their name first, and that's the other thing I want to talk about here. 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 then they did science to confirm that it, in fact, was not fair. And then they did  policy to make it so that  it was more fair. So there's  a part of this story for me  that's like, oh, things are,  like, kind of okay, but there's  another part that's like,  but only because people worked hard and thought hard and fought hard.

And even though it's hard–it's not easy to have every ballot have names in different orders–  even though it's hard, it's worth working to make it more fair. And enough people agreed  about that, that that's the system that we have now in Montana. It's not the same system  everywhere, but I'm glad that we have the system that we have here.

Also worth noting, this doesn't  just go for mail-in ballots. The ballots are also like this in the voting booths.  Ultimately, I think that we do it in this way because the people in charge of elections  want the result to most accurately reflect the desires of the people who live in the place.  And that's, like, good! I went from being frustrated to being a little  impressed by the secret-but-also-not-secret code on the bottom of my ballot.

Again, I know  most of you got this on lock,  but if you find yourself  procrastinating any individual element of the voting process, Vote.org is there for you.  Just go now. If you're not  sure if you're registered,  if you've moved, if you need to know where your polling place is, any of that stuff,  they've got the information for you. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.