Annie Tsai

Did you know that heading into every election, the County of San Mateo Office of Elections does a lottery drawing for which letter of the alphabet your ballot measure or bond is going to get as well as the order in which your name will show up on the ballot? Everyone interested convenes – this year was on August 15, 2024 – for the “Randomized Alphabet Drawing for Contests to be Voted on at the November 5, 2024 Presidential General Election.” 

Sounds very serious. And it’s taken very seriously, because if the letter you draw is anything less than stellar, or if your name order is drawn to, say, end up with your name on the other side of the ballot when all of your opponents are on the front, your campaign manager is going to be adding TUMS to their weekly grocery list for the next few months. 

The impact of this day is so important that it has a name – Ballot Order Effects – and all states have laws that mandate the order in which candidates appear on the ballot.

I’m sure the Office of Elections never considered or even if they had considered never cared that having a full cycle of ballot and bond measures every four years using the same naming convention every single time is extremely confusing from search engine optimization, or SEO, standpoint. If you type into your web browser’s search bar any letter – say “Measure X” – you’ll get results from multiple elections because existing campaign websites from prior elections have already done the hard work of generating the domain authority that gets you showing up in search engine results pages, or SERPs, on page one.

It definitely wasn’t on anyone’s mind in Sacramento when this legislation was passed in 1975 since none of this existed back then.

The other quirky thing about elections having repeating letters in the alphabet is that people have distinct memories tied to ballot measures that are completely different. For instance, the City of San Mateo’s housing ballot measure got the letter “T” and as I was researching other Measure T’s, I found one other from many elections ago had also touched my family. Measure T was on the 1996 ballot to approve building a tunnel at Devil’s Slide connecting Pacifica and Montara. 

As some of you might remember, the Devil’s Slide “sliding” problem was a decades long challenge for the coastside where since opening to drivers in 1936, it experienced multiple major landslides over the years. The 1995 landslide in particular, which closed that stretch of  Highway 1 for six months and turned a 25 minute commute into on some days a 2 hour one-way slog, stays seared in my memory because that was when my dad was a field engineer with Caltrans and was assigned to that project to help design and install monitoring systems to understand how much the earth was actually shifting. 

I remember this one time I was sitting at the dinner table doing homework pretty late when he had to go onsite during a heavy storm to help fix something that was damaged by the winds. Dad took this gigantic thermos of hot water and had layers of jackets on because anyone who has been on the coastline in the middle of the night knows that no matter what the thermostat says, it still somehow feels colder than a winter’s night in Minneapolis.  

When I called my dad to ask him about that time, memories were in moments and not details – a lot happens in nearly 30 years. He recalled when the monitoring system was done, news crews came out and asked him to show them how it worked. And he remembered that there were always a lot of people in the mix – those who wanted a bypass or who wanted a tunnel, as well as those who seemed to not care how it got fixed but simply that it was fixed fast. The tunnel ended up being an acceptable compromise for many as momentum built in support of this as a viable alternative to paving a road through a state park. On election day the following year after endless volunteer hours were put in, Measure T passed with 74% of the vote authorizing construction of what is now called the Tom Lantos Tunnel. 

Now ten years after the Tom Lantos tunnel has opened, it’s celebrated as a modern engineering marvel as the second and third longest tunnel in California. My kids can just barely hold their breaths long enough to get that wish in. And that old landslide-plagued stretch of Highway 1 that I used to love driving down because you were literally on the edge of the continent? A beautiful hiking trail that curves around the softened edges of our country.