G. Frink's

North Carolina's oddly structured presidential election ballot was designed to help create a firewall between Republican domination of the top of the ticket and conservative Democrats.

Voters swept away by Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy and its descendants could not be persuaded to simply vote a straight Republican ticket and go home, because the ballot is structured to require a single, separate vote for president/vice president.

After voting for president, voters must pause to consider down-ticket races either as a group, or individually.

In combination with other, more important strategies, it worked.

The full strategy limited the impact of Nixon's 1968 landslide and voters have chosen subsequently to leave the state under substantial Democratic control while voting for Republicans in every presidential election since 1980. Yet the ballot's confusing structure has extracted a continuous price in lost voter participation in presidential elections.

N.C. Board of Elections officials' persistent, careful explanations apparently have been unable to prevent a larger than usual percent of voters from skipping the president/vice president vote.

It has been estimated that perhaps three times as many voters do not have votes recorded for president in this state as in states with less confusing ballots. Specifically, about one percent is expected. Dr. Justin Moore of Duke University as estimated that 3.15% of N.C. voters did not have votes recorded for President in 2000, and 2.57% in 2004.

There is some concern that this year, with a close presidential vote in prospect in North Carolina, the ballot's impact on voter participation in the presidential race could be enough to determine the outcome here.

In particular, that because of the large number of first-time voters, and their support for Democratic nominee Barack Obama, ballot-induced confusion could conceivably deny Obama the state when he would otherwise have won it.

I think that unlikely at this point, but be careful to vote for president/vice president separately, as the ballot requires.