By Larry Bolinger
Alliance
President Trump is going after mail-in ballots again, we have unethical forced voting in Texas to change districts to favor one party over the other, but we have overlooked voter integrity in our own State of Nebraska. I have run for public office many times for local, state, and federal office, and voter integrity is always challenged because we want to improve our voter system and make our voting system both fair and secure. A policy I reviewed is the candidate placement policy. This policy is designed to give one party an advantage over the other. It does not allow equal campaign opportunities if you plan on running for public office. What this policy does is list the party of the Governor first on the ballot. The state Legislature is unicameral, so the party of the Governor should not be considered by how the name gets listed. But, state policy allows it. This could be an infraction of election laws. Usually, you would want an even rotation of the names on the ballot to make it a fair election. An equal rotation of the names or something politically unbiased, such as alphabetical order, would be more acceptable. The election laws should give equal opportunity to everyone. This policy favors one party over the other. For each party, the names rotate within the party. But the Party of the Governor gets placed first.
Nebraska State Statute 32-815
GENERAL ELECTION BALLOT; PARTISAN CANDIDATES; PLACEMENT AND ROTATION OF NAMES.
(1) The names of candidates for each partisan elective office shall be arranged on the ballot of the general election so that the political party polling the highest number of votes at the last general election for Governor will have the name of its nominee immediately beneath the name of the office for which the candidate was nominated, the political party polling the second highest number of votes will have the second place, the political party having the third highest number of votes will have the third place, and continuing with the political parties in descending order of number of votes, leaving those candidates whose names appear upon the ballot by petition to appear beneath all other candidates placed there by nomination. For each office for which there are more candidates than vacancies and there are two or more nominees of the same political party, the election commissioner or county clerk shall rotate the names of such candidates on the official ballot. In printing the ballots for the various election districts, the positions of the names shall be changed in each office division for each election district. In making the change of position, the printer shall take the line of type at the head of each division and place it at the bottom of that division, shoving up the column so that the name that was second shall be first after the change.