Jostling for positions on the ballot paper – Political advantage or plain superstition?

Last Friday afternoon, a simple exercise that was meant to place some thirteen presidential candidates on the ballot paper in the upcoming general elections ended up in hours of banter.

The exercise scheduled to be held in the hallowed offices of the Electoral Commission followed earlier announcement regarding which of the nineteen aspirants who submitted forms to contest the December 7 General Elections had qualified for filing.

Active political watchers will recall that when Ghana was ushered into this Fourth Republic, there was nothing like balloting for slots by candidates. A candidate’s position on the ballot was determined by various factors including order in the filing of completed nomination forms among others.

In the quest of the political parties to secure the topmost position, representatives of candidates ended up literally sleeping at the offices of the Electoral Commission just to enable them be first to file so they secure the sacred first ballot. The current format was therefore adopted for the 2000 General Elections to introduce fairness into the decision of who takes what slot. This has remained so since then.

From the conduct of the political parties that gathered for the exercise last Friday, it did somehow appear that the order in which the various parties were listed on the ballot was almost as important to them, as a traveler’s need to have a visa to travel to North America or some pristine location in Europe.

Even though the presiding officer had clearly outlined the procedure to be followed, our two leading political parties in particular had come in with their own expected outcomes and nothing would change that.

As they engaged in bouts of verbal tantrums that spanned several minutes and then hours, I kept wondering to myself to what extent the exact position of a candidate on the ballot could inure to the benefit of any particular candidate.

As I pondered further, I remembered how in times past, our parties would soon after balloting, carve all manner of justifications based on numerology, Holy scriptures and other considerations to underpin their coinage of various slogans. Whereas the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in year 2000, for instance, coined the popular  ‘asieho’ slogan with a thumb-down sign to remind voters that its candidate’s position was at the bottom of the ballot paper, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) referred to that slogan as being derogatory with sexual undertones and therefore unghanaian.

In that same election, the NDC which had secured position number two (after Dan Lartey’s GCPP) loudly proclaimed that picking that slot was a divine indication of the fact that God had ordained the party for victory in that year’s election. One of the slogans for the top position was ‘One Touch, No Rebound’. The People’s National Convention (PNC) symbolized its second position with a ‘two sure-two direct’ victory sign adding that it was surely a good omen that would lead the party to victory. All the other political parties in the election came out with similar justifications.

Eventually, when the results from the December 7, 2000, election were released, the bottom-placed NPP had secured the highest number of votes (though not enough to secure an ultimate victory) whereas the NDC had been placed second with the others nowhere to be found.

As though this should have served a good lesson to the political parties, the subsequent elections still saw the parties going through the same cycle.

In the 2016 elections, we saw how the NDC spent time justifying their third position on the ballot indicating that it meant the trinity God’s approval for its presidential candidate. In the case of the NPP in 2020, it actually went as far as composing songs to remind voters on its position.

A polling station activist in the Central Region went composed tweaked a very popular local Christian song to compose ‘Eko a hwe esuro ho, eko a to esuro ho, Nana Addo na oda ho no nti, eko a to esuro ho” (to wit, when you get into the voting booth, just look at the top of the ballot paper and vote for Nana Addo).

Within two hours following the balloting for the 2024 elections, persons sympathetic to the NDC had already began theorizing that in Pythagorean numerology, the number eight represents victory, prosperity and overcoming.

Eight is also considered a lucky number in Japan, but the reason is different from that in Chinese culture. Eight gives an idea of growing prosperous, because the number broadens gradually. Again, they added that in biblical symbolism, the number eight is associated with new beginnings, resurrection, and regeneration.

Typically, the supporters of the Movement for Change which picked the very bottom position are top of the moon jubilating about how that last position will propel Alan Kyeremateng to victory. As for the NPP which picked number one, some supporters have quickly began tweaking the ‘Breaking the Eight’ mantra to ‘Stopping the Eight’ in a direct attack on the NDC’s candidate who is now positioned at number eight.

The interesting thing in all of this is that, these rationalizations are coming from very well placed party officials whose educational background, intellectual acumen, stature in society, etc should ordinarily not lead them to pander to such hogwash. Even though the order of placement that any presidential candidate got was simply to determine the placement for the party’s parliamentary candidates across the country, the posture of our political activists suggest otherwise; as though the positions are what will automatically translate into political victories.

In well established democracies which are also advanced developed nations, the positioning of a candidate on the ballot is never an issue of concern. The reason for this is simply the fact that once the electorate are sufficiently educated, they are able to know and vote for their preferred candidates irrespective of where they are placed on the ballot. Unfortunately on this side of the globe, these same politicians have by design or default denied most of the electorate. They therefore require strategic positioning on the ballot to aid their campaign hence the asieho, esuroho, sloganeering.

Interestingly, a Professor of Psychology and Political Science based at Stanford University, Prof. Jon Krosnick after undertaking a research in 2017 explained the theory of the primacy effect which essentially indicates that in any given election where voters are less familiar with the candidates or do not have very strong preferences, voters are most likely to vote for the first name on the ballot as catches their attention. He however added that in cases where an election was too close to call, that primacy effect could be decisive.

Jon Krosnick who is reported by BBC to have spent thirty years studying how voters choose one candidate rather than another, says that “at least two” US Presidents won their elections because their names were listed first on the ballot, in States where the margin of victory was narrow. At first sight, Krosnick’s idea might seem to make little sense. Are voters really so easily swayed? Most of them are not, one will think.

“Most of the people that voted Republican were always going to vote Republican and most of the people that voted Democrat were always going to vote Democrat,” says James Tilley, a professor of politics at the University of Oxford.

However,  a minority are swayed. “There is a human tendency to lean towards the first name listed on the ballot,” says Krosnick. “And that has caused increases on average of about three percentage points for candidates, across lots of races and states and years.” The primacy effect, he adds, has the biggest impact on those who know the least about the election they are voting in. Krosnick actually used this theory and predicted Trump’s win in some swing states and ultimately the presidency in the United States in 2016.

The reality however is that just as happens in most instances of probability, the slots have sometimes inured to the benefit of some parties while it has failed in others.

We in Ghana, have practiced democracy under this Fourth Republican experiment for thirty-two years. One would have expected that by now, all actors in the democratic chain would have been fully educated to the point where basic engagements such as balloting for slots would have been seen less instead of what we witnessed full of tensions.

It is about time that agencies of State such as the National Commission for Civic Education, the Electoral Commission and the political parties themselves will place themselves at the centre of civic education towards eliminating negative tendencies such as these from aour body politic.

Let us not allow our political actors to play with the minds of the citizenry.