IMPLICATIONS FOR ELECTIONS

Because they involve substantive judgments about speciflc bills, the legislative panels could have far more powerful electoral implications than the priority panels. When secretaries of state present these panel results to voters, they would show candidates' votes on key legislation, but they would also permit voters to compare each candidate's vote with a

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democratic public voice—the verdicts of a representative, deliberative, and articulate body of fellow citizens (see box 7). This would make it possible for voters unfamiliar with issues to judge candidate votes more critically by moving past their own surface-level judgments and using those of the legislative panels. In effect, the voter guides distributed after legislative panels would permit a voter to simulate deliberating about ten national issues and comparing final deliberative judgments to candidate positions.

Some might wish to stop at this point, having provided interested voters with detailed printed and on-line information about candidates for the Ohio state legislature and the views of a deliberative sample of the state's population. I suggest going one step farther by providing a very simple piece of information that reduces the detail of the voter guide to a single numeric symbol—the percentage of agreement between the votes of each candidate and those of the legislative panels. The rationale behind this number is that past voting research has found that the typical voter prefers to choose candidates using only simple bits of information, as explained in chapter 3. Voters "tend to make use only of information that is incidental" or available information "for^[33] which there is virtually no cost, such as names and parties on ballots. Even when voters lack reliable clues that permit confldent deduction of which candidate would best represent them, they can flnd highly suggestive "cues" that tell them how to vote.^[34]

In candidate selection, as in most mental activities, people are cognitive misers. Considering the likelihood of one vote deciding an election, plus the finite difference between a typical pair of candidates, citizens attribute little value to making a correct voting choice. Consequently, voters give low priority to candidate selection relative to the more immediate concerns they must attend to in their daily lives. This may be truer of less sophisticated voters, but when cues such as a candidate's party affiliation are present, even more involved voters can overlook complex candidate characteristics and make decisions solely on the basis of simple heuristics.^[35]

In low-visibility elections, where the average voter has heard little about the candidates, many voters lack solid data upon which to base their choice, so they make their decision using simple facts, such as the candidate's party and sex.^[36] When voters know nothing about candidates prior to entering the voting booth, they must either make random choices or respond to the scant information that appears on the ballot itself. Assuming even the slightest sense of responsibility, voters are likely to take the latter course by voting based upon at least some information, no matter how mundane. Sometimes this means voting based on party, although that cue is often unavailable. Other times, voters choose candidates because their first name sounds male or female or their last name suggests a particular ethnic background.^[37]

The political scientist Arthur Lupia considered this problem in a study of insurance reform elections in California. As others have observed in

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national elections, Lupia found that some unsophisticated voters were able to make complex judgments by relying on cues from like-minded elites. Transferring the lesson of that election to the larger political process, Lupia recommends improving the quality of cues rather than pursuing wholesale civic education: "While scholars and pundits propose that we educate the public about politics in order to lessen the impact of uninformed votes on the responsiveness of democratic decision-making institutions … directing our efforts into the provision of credible and widely accessible ‘signals' may be a more effective and cost-efficient way to ensure the responsiveness of electoral outcomes.^[38]

I suggest providing voters with a new cue—a candidate rating that shows the extent to which each candidate's unofficial and official votes correspond to those of the legislative panels (see Box 8).^[39] The cue has the same virtue of other ballot cues, in that it is simple and readily available to even the least active voter. What sets it apart from all other ballot cues, except sometimes political party, is that it carries a tremendous amount of information. Particularly when one candidate has an agreement percentage (or "rating") well above the other candidates, a voter can use that cue to decide that the highest-rated candidate stands a much better chance of representing the public's interests. The cue is not flawless, but it provides uninformed, confused, or undecided voters with one simple fact to consider before marking their ballots.

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Finally, county clerks can use the candidate ratings to order the names of candidates on the ballot. Many candidates believe that the order of names on the ballots influences the outcome of elections by a small percentage. A rigorous study of this problem found name-order effects in 48 percent of 118 Ohio elections. In races where there was an ordering effect, the candidate listed first almost always beneflted, and the average impact was 2.5 percent. Partisan races and elections in counties with higher levels of political information were less likely to demonstrate ordering effects.^[40] It is discouraging to imagine that innumerable close races have been decided by the order of candidates' names on the ballot. Even if one doubted the necessity of convening citizen panels for all elections, one might still see wisdom in obtaining panel judgments in competitive races just to remove this problem. By listing candidates in descending order, with the highest-rated candidate first, clerks can assign this advantage in a manner that is less arbitrary than random ordering.