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Or perhaps vice versa?

It's not part of any conspiracy or even some bit of political intrigue.

Instead, it depends on where you live. And it's just the way lawmakers set it up.

But questions still remain about whether how the ballot order is set in Arizona is fair — and whether those listed first have a small but potentially significant advantage.

And, as both federal court litigation and state legislation has shown, what people believe about whether being first makes a statistical difference is linked to whether they think the current system helps or hurts them and their party.

Under the state Election Code, the order candidates appear on the general election ballot is set based on how well that party's candidate did in that county in the most recent gubernatorial election.

So the ballots this year in Apache, Coconino, Maricopa, Pima and Santa Cruz counties will have Democrat Katie Hobbs, who won in those counties in 2022, listed ahead of Republican Andy Biggs.

For residents of the other 10 counties, the first name they will see in the gubernatorial race is Biggs because Kari Lake outpolled Hobbs there four years ago.

But it's not just about the top of the ticket. Everyone else on that ballot gets the same preference.

So, in Pima County, for example, the Democrats running for Congress and the Legislature also will get top billing. Ditto the other four counties where Hobbs beat Lake in 2022, regardless of how well other Democrats on the ballot did that year.

Conversely, Republicans in the other 10 counties will get top billing.

Does it matter?

Democrats think so — or, at least, they did at one time.

That was ahead of the 2020 election when the ballot order was set by Republican Doug Ducey's 2018 victory over Democrat David Garcia.

In that case, Ducey took Maricopa County. And that was set to give GOP candidates in the state's largest county top billing in 2020 and again in 2022.

National Democratic groups cried foul, pointing out that Maricopa County has more registered voters than the rest of the state combined.

So in 2019, they filed suit, asking U.S. District Court Judge Diane Humetewa to preclude Hobbs — then the secretary of state — from following the ballot order law in 2020 and instead requiring she replace it with a system that rotates ballot order on a random basis.

To make their case, they cited research they said shows that there is a tendency of voters, all else being equal, to choose the first candidate on the list.

Among their witnesses was John Krosnick, a Stanford University, who testified that the concept of "order effects'' is not unique to ballots. The reason, he said, is that people take in information in a certain order.

Consider a menu.

"We typically start reading at the top of the menu and move down,'' he told the judge, getting information sequentially rather than all at once.

"When we encounter objects, usually there is a tendency to lean to the first thing we see,'' Krosnick testified, called it the "primary effect.''

He said there is evidence that if people are presented with four random glasses of beer, there is a bias toward saying they like the first one the best. Similarly, Krosnick said, someone driving into a parking lot to look for a space is more likely to turn down the first aisle available.

And he said that shows up in polls: If people are asked to rank the importance of issues, like education, crime, environment and so on, there is a tendency of people to rank the first one they hear as the most important. Krosnick said that's why pollsters asking such questions routinely rotate the order of options.

Mary O'Grady, an attorney for Hobbs, countered with testimony from Sean Trende, the senior elections analyst for Real Clear Politics. He questioned the reliability of studies showing any correlation between ballot order and voter choices.

In the end, though, Humetewa ignored all the math and analysis and tossed the case out.

The judge ruled that the individuals who challenged the way state law determines ballot order had no legal standing to sue because they are not injured in any way. She said they still have the right to vote for any candidate, regardless of order.

Similarly, she said claims by the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee were flawed because they failed to show that the system in place at the time frustrates their bid to get Democrats elected to statewide office. And Exhibit No. 1, Humetewa said, was the 2018 election of Kyrsten Sinema to the U.S. Senate, defeating Republican Martha McSally.

Appellate courts were no more sympathetic, and the case died.

As it turned out, Democrats ended up doing fairly well in the 2020 race.

Joe Biden outpolled Donald Trump in the presidential race. Mark Kelly ousted Martha McSally — she had been appointed by Ducey to fill out the term of John McCain after his death — from the U.S. Senate. And Democrats won five of the nine congressional seats.

And in 2022 Hobbs beat Lake for governor, and Democrats elected Ruben Gallego to the U.S. Senate and took the races for secretary of state and attorney general.

But now the proverbial shoe is on the other foot, with Hobbs' victory meaning Democrats are getting that first position in five counties in November, including Maricopa.

That got the attention last year of Rep. Alexander Kolodin. The Scottsdale Republican concluded that Democrats were right all along: It's not fair to have ballot order determined by who won the last governor's race.

So he introduced legislation to require ballots for the general election to be crafted so that, from precinct to precinct, the order of which party goes first is rotated. That would have meant that each party gets an equal chance to be in that first position — pretty much what Democrats were asking for ahead of the 2020 election.

Kolodin, in pushing his plan, was unapologetic about his effort,

"The Legislature saw fit to, fairly in my view, provide that advantage to the party that had won the governor's office,'' he said of the law in place when Ducey had won his races for governor.

Put another way, Kolodin said, Republican lawmakers have every right to set up a system that was designed to benefit their candidates.

"It's not fair to take that advantage away from a political party in the middle of a gubernatorial term,'' he said. "And you get to keep that prize for the four years.''

He managed to convince colleagues in the House to adopt the rotation plan. But the plan failed when two Republican senators joined with all the Democrats to kill it.

Kolodin, who is now running for secretary of state, said he remains convinced that the current ballot order system needs to be replaced.

"No political party should enjoy an advantage over another merely because of how a ballot is designed,'' he said, saying it "ensures fairness for all Arizonans, regardless of party.''

All this becomes relevant again with the November general election.

In counties where Biggs defeats Hobbs, then under the law Republicans will have top billing status in those counties in the 2028 and 2030 elections. And in the counties she wins, then look for Democrats at the top of each race for the next two elections.