Order of Candidates on the Ballot

New Hampshire RSA 656:5-a defines the order in which candidates’ names will appear on the ballots. For the sake of consistency with the ballot, the Beacon’s On the Ballot section follows the same scheme.

The essence of the RSA 656:5-a scheme is that as an election draws near, the Secretary of State’s office picks a random number for each possible number of candidates in a race. The candidate whose position in a specific race’s alphabetical list of candidates matches the random number chosen for races with that number of candidates becomes the candidate who is listed first on the ballot. The ballot for that race continues from that point in the alphabetical list, wrapping back to the beginning of the list to include all the candidates.

In other words, if candidates A, B, and C are running against each other and the Secretary of State randomly selects the number 2 for races with three candidates, then the candidates will appear on the ballot in this order: B, C, A.