Amdt14.S1.4.3.3.2.1 Facial Denials or Restrictions of the Right to Vote

Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Voter Qualifications

States may require residency as a qualification to vote, but durational residence laws . . . are unconstitutional unless the State can demonstrate that such laws are necessary to promote a compelling governmental interest.¹ The Court applies [t]his exacting test because the right to vote is a fundamental political right, . . . preservative of all rights, and because a durational residence requirement directly impinges on the exercise of a second fundamental personal right, the right to travel.² The Court indicated that the states have a legitimate and compelling interest in preventing fraud by voters, but that it is impossible to view durational residence requirements as necessary to achieve that state interest.³

However, a 50-day durational residence requirement was sustained in the context of the closing of the registration process at 50 days prior to elections and of the mechanics of the state’s registration process. The period, the Court found, was necessary to achieve the state’s legitimate goals.⁴

A state that exercised general criminal, taxing, and other jurisdiction over persons on certain federal enclaves within the state, the Court held, could not treat these persons as nonresidents for voting purposes.⁵ A statute that provided that anyone who entered military service outside the state could not establish voting residence in the state so long as he remained in the military was held to deny to such a person the opportunity such as all non-military persons enjoyed of showing that he had established residence.⁶ Restricting the suffrage to those persons who had paid a poll tax was an invidious discrimination because it introduced a capricious or irrelevant factor of wealth or ability to pay into an area in which it had no place.⁷ Extending this ruling, the Court held that the eligibility to vote in local school elections may not be limited to persons owning property in the district or who have children in school,⁸ and denied states the right to restrict the vote to property owners in elections on the issuance of revenue bonds⁹ or general obligation bonds.¹⁰ By contrast, the Court upheld a statute that required voters to present a government-issued photo identification in order to vote, as the state had not required voters to pay a tax or a fee to obtain a new photo identification. The Court added that, although obtaining a government-issued photo identification is an inconvenience to voters, it surely does not qualify as a substantial burden.¹¹

The Court has also held that, because the activities of a water storage district fell so disproportionately on landowners as a group, a limitation of the franchise in elections for the district’s board of directors to landowners, whether resident or not and whether natural persons or not, excluding non-landowning residents and lessees of land, and weighing the votes granted according to assessed valuation of land, comported with equal protection standards.¹² Adverting to the reservation in prior local governmental unit election cases¹³ that some functions of such units might be so specialized as to permit deviation from the usual rules, the Court then proceeded to assess the franchise restrictions according to the traditional standards of equal protection rather than by those of strict scrutiny.¹⁴ Also narrowly approached was the issue of the effect of the District’s activities, the Court focusing upon the assessments against landowners as the sole means of paying expenses rather than additionally noting the impact upon lessees and non-landowning residents of such functions as flood control. The approach taken in this case seems different in great degree from that in prior cases and could in the future alter the results in other local government cases. These cases were extended somewhat in Ball v. James,¹⁵ a 5-to-4 decision that sustained a system in which voting eligibility was limited to landowners and votes were allocated to these voters on the basis of the number of acres they owned. The entity was a water reclamation district that stores and delivers water to 236,000 acres of land in the state and subsidizes its water operations by selling electricity to hundreds of thousands of consumers in a nearby metropolitan area. The entity’s board of directors was elected through a system in which the eligibility to vote was as described above. The Court thought the entity was a specialized and limited form to which its general franchise rulings did not apply.¹⁶

Finding that prevention of raiding—the practice whereby voters in sympathy with one party vote in another’s primary election in order to distort that election’s results—is a legitimate and valid state goal, as one element in the preservation of the integrity of the electoral process, the Court sustained a state law requiring those voters eligible at that time to register to enroll in the party of their choice at least 30 days before the general election in order to be eligible to vote in the party’s next primary election, 8 to 11 months hence. The law did not impose a prohibition upon voting but merely imposed a time deadline for enrollment, the Court held, and it was because of the plaintiffs’ voluntary failure to register that they did not meet the deadline.¹⁷ But a law that prohibited a person from voting in the primary election of a political party if he had voted in the primary election of any other party within the preceding 23 months was subjected to strict scrutiny and was voided, because it constituted a severe restriction upon a voter’s right to associate with the party of his choice by requiring him to forgo participation in at least one primary election in order to change parties.¹⁸ A less restrictive closed primary system was also invalidated, the Court finding insufficient justification for a state’s preventing a political party from allowing independents to vote in its primary.¹⁹

It must not be forgotten, however, that it is only when a state extends the franchise to some and denies it to others that a right to vote arises and is protected by the Equal Protection Clause. If a state chooses to fill an office by means other than through an election, neither the Equal Protection Clause nor any other constitutional provision prevents it from doing so. Thus, in Rodriguez v. Popular Democratic Party,²⁰ the Court unanimously sustained a Puerto Rico statute that authorized the political party to which an incumbent legislator belonged to designate his successor in office until the next general election upon his death or resignation. Neither the fact that the seat was filled by appointment nor the fact that the appointment was by the party, rather than by the governor or some other official, raised a constitutional question.

The right of unconvicted jail inmates and convicted misdemeanants (who typically are under no disability) to vote by absentee ballot remains unsettled. In an early case applying rational basis scrutiny, the Court held that the failure of a state to provide for absentee balloting by unconvicted jail inmates, when absentee ballots were available to other classes of voters, did not deny equal protection when it was not shown that the inmates could not vote in any other way.²¹ Subsequently, the Court held unconstitutional a statute denying absentee registration and voting rights to persons confined awaiting trial or serving misdemeanor sentences, but it is unclear whether the basis was the fact that persons confined in jails outside the county of their residences could register and vote absentee while those confined in the counties of their residences could not, or whether the statute’s jumbled distinctions among categories of qualified voters on no rational standard made it wholly arbitrary.²²

Access to the Ballot

The Equal Protection Clause applies to state specification of qualifications for elective and appointive office. Although one may have no right to be elected or appointed to an office, all persons do have a federal constitutional right to be considered for public service without the burden of invidiously discriminatory disqualification. The State may not deny to some the privilege of holding public office that it extends to others on the basis of distinctions that violate federal constitutional guarantees.²³ In Bullock v. Carter,²⁴ the Court used a somewhat modified form of the strict test in passing upon a filing fee system for primary election candidates that imposed the cost of the election wholly on the candidates and that made no alternative provision for candidates unable to pay the fees; the reason for application of the standard, however, was that the fee system deprived some classes of voters of the opportunity to vote for certain candidates and it worked its classifications along lines of wealth. The system itself was voided because it was not reasonably connected with the state’s interest in regulating the ballot and did not serve that interest and because the cost of the election could be met out of the state treasury, thus avoiding the discrimination.²⁵

Recognizing the state interest in maintaining a ballot of reasonable length in order to promote rational voter choice, the Court observed nonetheless that filing fees alone do not test the genuineness of a candidacy or the extent of voter support for an aspirant. Therefore, effectuation of the legitimate state interest must be achieved by means that do not unfairly or unnecessarily burden the party’s or the candidate’s important interest in the continued availability of political opportunity. The interests involved are not merely those of parties or individual candidates; the voters can assert their preferences only through candidates or parties or both and it is this broad interest that must be weighed in the balance. . . . [T]he process of qualifying candidates for a place on the ballot may not constitutionally be measured solely in dollars.²⁶ In the absence of reasonable alternative means of ballot access, the Court held, a state may not disqualify an indigent candidate unable to pay filing fees.²⁷

In Clements v. Fashing,²⁸ the Court sustained two provisions of state law, one that barred certain officeholders from seeking election to the legislature during the term of office for which they had been elected or appointed, but that did not reach other officeholders whose terms of office expired with the legislators’ terms and did not bar legislators from seeking other offices during their terms, and the other that automatically terminated the terms of certain officeholders who announced for election to other offices, but that did not apply to other officeholders who could run for another office while continuing to serve. The Court was splintered in such a way, however, that it is not possible to derive a principle from the decision applicable to other fact situations.

In Williams v. Rhodes,²⁹ a complex statutory structure that had the effect of keeping off the ballot all but the candidates of the two major parties was struck down under the strict test because it deprived the voters of the opportunity of voting for independent and third-party candidates and because it seriously impeded the exercise of the right to associate for political purposes. Similarly, a requirement that an independent candidate for office in order to obtain a ballot position must obtain 25,000 signatures, including 200 signatures from each of at least 50 of the state’s 102 counties, was held to discriminate against the political rights of the inhabitants of the most populous counties, when it was shown that 93.4% of the registered voters lived in the 49 most populous counties.³⁰ But to provide that the candidates of any political organization obtaining 20% or more of the vote in the last gubernatorial or presidential election may obtain a ballot position simply by winning the party’s primary election, while requiring candidates of other parties or independent candidates to obtain the signatures of less than five percent of those eligible to vote at the last election for the office sought, is not to discriminate unlawfully, because the state placed no barriers of any sort in the way of obtaining signatures and because write-in votes were also freely permitted.³¹

Reviewing under the strict test the requirements for qualification of new parties and independent candidates for ballot positions, the Court recognized as valid objectives and compelling interests the protection of the integrity of the nominating and electing process, the promotion of party stability, and the assurance of a modicum of order in regulating the size of the ballot by requiring a showing of some degree of support for independents and new parties before they can get on the ballot.³² [T]o comply with the First and Fourteenth Amendments the State must provide a feasible opportunity for new political organizations and their candidates to appear on the ballot.³³ Decision whether or not a state statutory structure affords a feasible opportunity is a matter of degree, very much a matter of ‘consider[ing] the facts and circumstances behind the law, the interest which the State claims to be protecting, and the interest of those who are disadvantaged by the classification.’³⁴

Thus, in order to assure that parties seeking ballot space command a significant, measurable quantum of community support, Texas was upheld in treating different parties in ways rationally constructed to achieve this objective. Candidates of parties whose gubernatorial choice polled more than 200,000 votes in the last general election had to be nominated by primary elections and went on the ballot automatically, because the prior vote adequately demonstrated support. Candidates whose parties polled less than 200,000 but more than 2 percent could be nominated in primary elections or in conventions. Candidates of parties not coming within either of the first two categories had to be nominated in conventions and could obtain ballot space only if the notarized list of participants at the conventions totaled at least one percent of the total votes cast for governor in the last preceding general election or, failing this, if in the 55 succeeding days a requisite number of qualified voters signed petitions to bring the total up to one percent of the gubernatorial vote. [W]hat is demanded may not be so excessive or impractical as to be in reality a mere device to always, or almost always, exclude parties with significant support from the ballot, but the Court thought that one percent, or 22,000 signatures in 1972, falls within the outer boundaries of support the State may require.³⁵ Similarly, independent candidates can be required to obtain a certain number of signatures as a condition to obtain ballot space.³⁶ A state may validly require that each voter participate only once in each year’s nominating process and it may therefore disqualify any person who votes in a primary election from signing nominating or supporting petitions for independent parties or candidates.³⁷ Equally valid is a state requirement that a candidate for elective office, as an independent or in a regular party, must not have been affiliated with a political party, or with one other than the one of which he seeks its nomination, within one year prior to the primary election at which nominations for the general election are made.³⁸ So too, a state may limit access to the general election ballot to candidates who received at least 1% of the primary votes cast for the particular office.³⁹ But it is impermissible to print the names of the candidates of the two major parties only on the absentee ballots, leaving off independents and other parties.⁴⁰ Also invalidated was a requirement that independent candidates for President and Vice-President file nominating petitions by March 20 in order to qualify for the November ballot.⁴¹