Losers come first on the presidential ballot in Minnesota. Alphabetical order is the rule in Maine. The luck of the draw decides placement in Oklahoma.

The chance that top billing could give a candidate an edge has led states to hold lotteries, rotate lists, dig up old election results and resort to a variety of other schemes to decide whose name goes first.In Arizona, for example, candidates appear first according to which party won a particular county in the last gubernatorial race. Bob Dole will be first in 12 Arizona counties and President Clinton in three on Nov. 5.

"It's so confusing, even I get confused," said Lisa Daniel, state elections director.

Fourteen years of research by Bob Darcy, a professor at Oklahoma State University, turned up no evidence that ballot order made any difference. Yet politicians won't believe it, and some other scholars say top billing could be worth as much as 3 percent to 5 percent.

"It's like the Irish - a thousand years hasn't changed their belief in fairies and leprechauns," Darcy said. "A politician is grasping at straws, doing everything he or she can to influence the outcome of an election."

Influential or not, ballot ordering is touchy enough to make states go through elaborate rituals to assign slots for candidates.

In Minnesota, a bad performance in 1992 means a higher ballot listing in 1996. Thus voters there will see Ross Perot first because he came in third in 1992. Dole and Clinton come next, followed by minor party candidates in the order they filed with the secretary of state.

Alphabetical order is the rule of thumb in a number of states, including Maine and Nevada. But for others, that just isn't good enough.

And it can get pretty complicated. California, for example, holds a random drawing of letters, which are then used to order the candidates by last name. If the letters turned up as g,a,c,p,d, etc., then Clinton would go first, followed by Perot and Dole.

But that's just for the state's 1st Congressional District. The 2nd District would start with the second letter the 3rd District with the third letter and so forth.

Drawings of random letters also determine ballot order in Alaska and Oregon, only they stick to one sequence of letters.

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Utah says each county can make up its own mind about how candidates appear on the ballot. Oklahoma put Democrats first - by law - until a federal court said it was unconstitutional.

Oklahoma, Colorado and New Jersey hold lottery-style drawings.

So does South Dakota, where the luck of the draw landed Lyndon LaRouche the top spot in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary. Libertarians got the top spot for the general election this year.

Clinton will appear first on Florida and Missouri ballots because those states have Democratic governors, while Dole gets top billing for the same reason in Pennsylvania, Texas and Connecticut.

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