Q&AZ: Which candidates will be listed first in Arizona’s midterm election ballots and why?

Wondering why Democrats are listed first on your ballot? Or perhaps vice versa?

It's not part of any conspiracy or even some bit of political intrigue. Instead, it depends on where you live. And it's just the way lawmakers set it up.

But questions still remain about whether the way the ballot order is set in Arizona is fair, and whether those listed first have a small but potentially significant advantage.

Both federal court litigation and state legislation has shown what people believe about whether being first makes a statistical difference is linked to whether they think the current system helps or hurts them and their party.

Under the state Election Code, the order candidates appear on the general election ballot is based on how well that party's candidate did in that county in the most recent gubernatorial election.

So the ballots this year in Apache, Coconino, Maricopa, Pima and Santa Cruz counties will have Democrat Katie Hobbs, who won in those counties in 2022, listed ahead of Republican Andy Biggs.

For residents of the other 10 counties, the first name they will see in the gubernatorial races is Biggs because Kari Lake outpolled Hobbs there four years ago.

But it's not just about the top of the ticket. Everyone else on that ballot gets the same preference.

So, in Pima County, for example, the Democrats running for Congress and the Legislature also will get top billing. Ditto the other four counties where Hobbs beat Lake in 2022, regardless of how well other Democrats on the ballot did that year.

Conversely, Republicans in the other 10 counties will get top billing.

Does it matter?

Democrats think so. Or, at least, they did at one time.

That was ahead of the 2020 election when the ballot order was set by Republican Doug Ducey's 2018 victory over Democrat David Garcia.

In that case, Ducey took Maricopa County, and that was set to give GOP candidates in the state's largest county top billing in 2020 and again in 2022.

National Democratic groups cried foul, pointing out that Maricopa County has more registered voters than the rest of the state combined.

So in 2019, they filed suit, asking U.S. District Court Judge Diane Humetewa to preclude Hobbs — then the secretary of state — from following the ballot order law in 2020 and instead requiring she replace it with a system that rotates ballot order on a random basis.

Humetewa tossed the case out, ruling that the individuals who challenged the way state law determines ballot order had no legal standing to sue because they are not injured in any way.

Appellate courts were no more sympathetic and the case died.

As it turned out, Democrats ended up doing fairly well in the 2020 race.

Joe Biden outpolled Donald Trump in the presidential race. Mark Kelly ousted Martha McSally from the U.S. Senate. And Democrats won five of the nine congressional seats.

And in 2022 Hobbs beat Lake for governor and Democrats elected Ruben Gallego to the U.S. Senate and took the races for secretary of state and attorney general.

Now Hobbs' victory means Democrats are getting that first position in five counties in November, including Maricopa.

That got the attention last year of Rep. Alexander Kolodin. The Scottsdale Republican concluded that Democrats were right all along: It's not fair to have ballot order determined by who won the last governor's race.

So he introduced legislation to require ballots for the general election to be crafted so that, from precinct to precinct, the order of which party goes first is rotated. That would have meant that each party gets an equal chance to be in that first position — pretty much what Democrats were asking for ahead of the 2020 election.

Kolodin, in pushing his plan, was unapologetic about his effort.

"The Legislature saw fit to, fairly in my view, provide that advantage to the party that had won the governor's office," he said of the law in place when Ducey had won his races for governor.

"It's not fair to take that advantage away from a political party in the middle of a gubernatorial term," he said. "And you get to keep that prize for the four years."

He managed to convince colleagues in the House to adopt the rotation plan. But the plan failed when two Republican senators joined with all the Democrats to kill it.

Kolodin, who now is running for secretary of state, said he remains convinced that the current ballot order system needs to be replaced.

"No political party should enjoy an advantage over another merely because of how a ballot is designed," he said.