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Carolina Curious: 'O,' Now I Get It. How NC Orders Candidates' Names

A sample ballot shows the order of presidential candidates in the Democratic Primary. WFDD screen capture.

Early voting is underway and many people are seeing a dizzying number of names on their ballots. There are 15 Democrats on North Carolina's ballots and 16 candidates for Libertarian voters to consider.

That led to a question from listener Yvonne Truhon: “Who decides in what order candidates are listed on our ballot?”

In this edition of Carolina Curious, we find the answer.

Let's start by looking at the Democratic primary. Alphabetically, the list should start with former candidate Michael Bennet.

But it doesn't. Tim Tsujii, director of Forsyth County's elections, explains why.

“So in even-numbered-year elections, the state board of elections, by law, they are required to randomly select the letter that the candidates' names will start [with], and so for this election, they drew the letter ‘O,'” he says. 

That mean

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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