Dear Editor:

Isn't it "wonder"ful?

Voting early in the 2024 general election, I wondered how the order of candidates for president was determined. Why, I wondered, was the Harris-Walz ticket afforded the premium place of first in queue, while the Trump-Vance team was relegated to next to last in the sea of seven candidates.

A call to Santa Fe to the Bureau of Elections gave me some answers but created others.

It seems Santa Fe hired a tech company to randomize the English alphabet. They took each letter and "randomly" selected another letter to replace each of the 26. "A" became "N," "B" became "Y," "C" became "U," etc. Now, instead of "A through Z," we have "N through W." (N, Y, U, I, Z, A, V, X, R, L, H, J, E, K, J, M, B, P, O, C, S, F, T, Q, D, W).

Assigning a numerical place in the "randomized" alphabet to each of the seven presidential candidates, based on the first letter of the candidate's last name, state government offers us the ballot order of presidential candidates:

Kamala Harris (H) – 11th place in random alphabet – first in ballot order
Laura Ebke (E) -- 13th place in random alphabet – second in ballot order
Robert Kennedy (K) – 14th place in random alphabet – third in ballot order
Chase Oliver (O) – 19th place in random alphabet – fourth in ballot order
Jill Stein (S) – 21st place in random alphabet – fifth in ballot order
Donald Trump (T) – 23rd place in random alphabet – sixth in ballot order
Claudia De la Cruz (D) – 25th place in random alphabet – seventh in ballot order.

I wonder, how many times was the dice rolled 'til they got the result they wanted. How many tries at "randomization" did it take to get the Harris-Walz team on top and the Trump-Vance ticket at the bottom?

Did the Bureau of Elections consider other approaches like, maybe, placing the two major party's candidates in the two top ballot positions, and randomizing the other five minor candidates? I wonder.

These kinds of shenanigans are what make people distrustful of government and the election process. When bureaucrats say they used a "random" method, and it turned out for their benefit, I have to wonder about the "random" process.

Randomization or not, all I know is one major candidate got top billing, while the other major candidate got the cellar.

Roger Lanse