Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.“Vote early and often” is (hopefully) a joke when applied to American elections. But for Major League Baseball, it’s an earnest exhortation.Every summer, the biggest stars in baseball face off in a much-hyped, albeit just-for-fun, All-Star Game. (This year’s is on Tuesday, July 14, in Philadelphia.) And, crucially for those of us who write for a news site about elections, the game’s starters are elected by the popular vote of millions of MLB fans.Elections for the MLB All-Star Game, though, are a comically warped version of their political counterparts. During the first round of voting, which took place over three weeks in June, each voter could cast up to five ballots … per day. During the second round, fans are limited to “just” one vote per day. MLB, apparently, does not feel bound to the “one person, one vote” doctrine — although, in fairness, its goals are probably more about driving engagement than conducting a truly representative election. (Case in point: You can cast one additional vote per day by downloading a gaming app developed by MLB’s business partner Konami.)MLB fans have complained about this voting process — or some version of it — almost since the very first All-Star Game in 1933. They gripe that it’s just a popularity contest, kvetch that deserving players got snubbed, and bellyache that it lets big fan bases drown out small ones. “Can the Pittsburgh Pirates fan base ever compete with the [Los Angeles] Dodgers fan base? Never,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a Philadelphia Phillies fan. “That’s the equivalent of the Republican Party versus some minor party out there.”And yet, there’s a lot to praise about the All-Star Game election too. It turns out that MLB’s voting process actually follows a lot of the same best practices that government-run elections do. For instance, just as localities with significant non-English-speaking populations offer ballots in other languages, the MLB ballot is available in Spanish and Japanese (after the U.S., Latin America and Japan are home to the most baseball fans). Just as election workers have accessible voting devices on hand for voters with disabilities, MLB worked with an accessibility-testing company to make sure its voting interface would work well for fans who rely on assistive technology.And the design of the voting website itself gets high marks from experts who study ballots for a living. Whitney Quesenbery, the chief program officer at the Center for Civic Design and a New York Mets fan, noted the ballot “has a few fun features that make it easier to keep track of who you are voting for.” Quesenbery specifically pointed to the stars down the center of the ballot (which get colored in when you vote for the player next to them, like a bubble on a paper ballot) and the avatars of each player that appear at the top of the ballot when you vote for them. “I’d give this a few points for cleverness, and helping tame a long ballot,” Quesenbery said.And the ballot is long, especially in the first round of voting, when there are 30 candidates (one for every MLB team) for most positions. By default, they’re listed in alphabetical order, which could have been a problem given that some studies show that being listed first on a ballot gives candidates an advantage. Many states solve this by randomizing the order in which candidates are listed; MLB solved it by allowing voters to sort the candidates by stats like batting average and home runs.Another problem that arises from having too many candidates in an election is that it increases the chance of someone winning without a majority. But MLB has a fix for this too: After all votes are tallied in the first round of voting, the top two finishers in each league at each position advance to a second round (except the top overall vote-getter across all positions, who automatically wins the right to start at his position). That set-up should be quite familiar to political observers. “It’s akin to what a traditional runoff looks like,” said Becker, noting that the system prevents a winner who is opposed by a majority of the electorate. “If everyone else who voted for the other [eliminated] candidates thinks the second-place candidate is better, that guy will start.”One thing that’s definitely not a best practice: the fact that the All-Star Game election is conducted online. While some states allow military voters and voters with disabilities to cast ballots online, cybersecurity experts agree that internet voting poses huge security risks and is impossible to verify. Although voters in many U.S. jurisdictions cast ballots on voting machines, there is almost always a paper trail, and the machines are not connected to the internet.MLB says it has safeguards in place to prevent vote-hacking or ballot-box-stuffing. “We actively monitor for and automatically disqualify any votes generated by scripts, bots, or automated mechanics,” a spokesperson told Votebeat. However, that hasn’t stopped a movement among some fans for the league to return to paper ballots, which it discontinued in 2015. That might also sound familiar — although election integrity probably isn’t the prime motivator in this case. Ballot boxes can be stuffed with paper ballots too — in fact, one of the most notorious examples of All-Star Game “voter fraud” came in 1957, well before the dawn of internet voting. That year, fans of the Cincinnati Redlegs cast more ballots than every other major-league city combined. The local newspaper printed a daily ballot; a popular local TV host urged her viewers to vote; and a beer company supplied ballots to local bars. Redlegs won seven out of the eight races they were up for (the only exception was St. Louis Cardinal Stan Musial, who won the race to start at first base). In response, the then-commissioner of baseball unilaterally replaced two of the victorious Redlegs with future Hall of Famers Willie Mays and Hank Aaron and took away MLB fans’ All-Star Game voting privileges for 13 years.It turns out that, in MLB as well as in the U.S., there’s no silver bullet to running a perfect election. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere. Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.
