Opinion ID: 4562703
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Ballot Regulation in America.

Text: The history of ballot regulation in America reveals that concerns about balloting are as old as the Republic itself, and it makes clear that the political branches of state governments have long taken the lead in resolving those 42 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 43 of 152 controversies. The States also have taken a variety of approaches to addressing these perceived concerns. At the Founding, Americans voted using their voices, a show of hands, or ballots prepared by individual voters, political parties, and party organizations. Joseph P. Harris, Election Administration in the United States 150–52 (1934); Burson v. Freeman, 504 U.S. 191, 200 (1992) (plurality opinion). The Southern States retained voice voting the longest; Kentucky did not abandon it until 1890. Harris, supra, at 151 & n.8. But because of the abuses associated with voice voting, including bribery and voter intimidation, most States began to use paper ballots within two decades of the Founding. Burson, 504 U.S. at 200 (plurality opinion). As paper ballots became more widespread, some of the abuses associated with voice voting “reinfected the election process.” Id. Political parties printed their ballots on colorful paper, often with distinctive designs, so that the ballots could be easily distinguished at the polls. Harris, supra, at 151. This practice threatened ballot secrecy and made bribery and voter intimidation easier to accomplish, so state legislatures enacted laws that required the use of white paper or official envelopes for ballots. Id. at 151–52. Other abuses that had not been possible with voice voting also arose. The party organizations that printed the ballots engaged in fraudulent practices. They 43 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 44 of 152 would sometimes distribute fake ballots that bore the markings of one party but contained only a few of that party’s candidates—“just enough to fool the unwary.” Id. at 152. And in some elections, the party organizations would decline to place the names of some qualified candidates on their ballots, which made it impossible for those candidates to be elected. Id. These abuses led Americans to adopt the “Australian ballot”—an official ballot containing the names of all qualified candidates that election officials distribute at the polls. Id. at 152–54. As its name suggests, this kind of ballot first appeared in Australia in the 1850s, and American States rapidly adopted it between 1887 and 1900. Id. Although a “true Australian ballot” grouped the names of all candidates beneath the office for which they were running without identifying their party affiliation, most American States did not adopt the original form of the Australian ballot. Id. at 154. Instead, the States modified the Australian ballot “to retain the strength of the political parties.” Id. Many States grouped the candidates of each party into separate columns with a party circle at the top of each column that enabled voters to “vote a ‘straight ticket’ with a single mark.” Id. at 155. Others retained the Australian ballot’s grouping of candidates by office, adding only the party designation of the candidates. Id. at 154–55. Concerns about the order in which candidates appear on the ballot have been with us since the adoption of the Australian ballot. By 1934, States followed 44 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 45 of 152 several different practices for ordering their ballots. States that used party-column ballots determined the parties’ position on the ballot from left to right in one of five ways: (1) alphabetically, (2) a definite order fixed by state law, with the party in power given the first column, (3) in order of the votes received for some office in the last election, (4) by the election officer charged with preparing the ballot, or (5) by lottery. Id. at 180. Among political parties, the left-most column was “most desired,” but the advantage gained from that position was viewed as “not great.” Id. In States that used office-group ballots, a common view was that “the position at the top of a list of candidates is of material help to the candidate thus favored.” Id. at 181. States dealt with this perceived advantage for first-listed candidates in different ways. Some rotated the names of candidates by ballot or voting precinct, but others established a uniform ballot order based on the votes a party received in the last general election, candidate last name, the order in which nominating petitions were received, or lottery. Id. at 181–83. Today, States continue to use different methods to order their ballots. Some States, like Florida, determine ballot order based on the results of the last election for Governor or another state office. Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 16-502(E); Conn. Gen. Stat. § 9-249a(a); Fla. Stat. § 101.151(3)(a); Ga. Code Ann. § 21-2-285(c); Ind. Code § 3-11-2-6(a)(1); Md. Code Ann., Elec. Law §§ 1-101(dd), 9-210(j)(2); 45 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 46 of 152 Mich. Comp. Laws § 168.703; Mo. Rev. Stat. § 115.239(1); Neb. Rev. Stat. § 32815(1); N.Y. Elec. Law § 7-116(1); 25 Pa. Cons. Stat. § 2963(b); Tex. Elec. Code Ann. § 52.091(b). Others determine it based on the party that currently holds a majority in the state legislature, Tenn. Code Ann. §§ 2-1-104(a)(11)–(12), 2-5- 208(d)(1), or the number of votes each party received in the last congressional election, Wyo. Stat. Ann. § 22-6-121(a). The Minnesota rule is similar to the NFL draft: candidates of the major party that won the fewest votes in the preceding election are listed first. Minn. Stat. § 204D.13(2). Delaware has the most straightforward rule: Democrats first, then Republicans. Del. Code Ann. tit. 15, § 4502(a)(5). And still other States order their ballots based on nonpartisan considerations. See, e.g., Ala. Code § 17-6-25 (alphabetical by candidate last name); Ark. Code Ann. § 7-5-207(c)(1) (random lottery); Ky. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 118.225(1) (rotating candidate names in each congressional district). 2. The Voters and Organizations’ Complaint Is Nonjusticiable. Against this wide array of state practice, voters and organizations brought this constitutional challenge to Florida’s 70-year-old law that assigns the top ballot position to candidates of the incumbent Governor’s party. They alleged violations of the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as interpreted in a line of decisions beginning with Anderson, 460 U.S. 780, and Burdick, 504 U.S. 428. 46 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 47 of 152 The voters and organizations’ complaint, in a nutshell, is that Florida’s ballot statute confers an impermissible partisan advantage on Republicans by virtue of the primacy effect. Because Republican candidates enjoy a “windfall vote” of approximately five percentage points from disinterested voters who reflexively pick the first candidate, the Democratic voters and organizations have a harder time electing their preferred candidates than if Florida distributed the windfall vote more evenly. They argue that this regime burdens their right to vote and should be evaluated using the approach established in Anderson and Burdick. The recent decision of the Supreme Court in Rucho compels the conclusion that this complaint presents a nonjusticiable political question. This complaint shares the same critical feature that led the Supreme Court to hold complaints of partisan gerrymandering nonjusticiable in Rucho: neither this complaint of partisan advantage from ballot order nor complaints of partisan advantage from redistricting can be adjudicated using “judicially discernible and manageable” standards. Rucho, 139 S. Ct. at 2502. In Rucho, the Supreme Court held that complaints of partisan gerrymandering are nonjusticiable for two main reasons. First, these complaints invariably rest on a threshold determination about what a “fair” apportionment of political power looks like. See id. at 2499–500. The Court reasoned that one possible standard of fairness—proportional representation—might have been 47 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 48 of 152 judicially manageable but had no basis in constitutional law or the history of the Republic. See id. at 2499. And absent proportional representation, the Court explained, “it is not even clear what fairness looks like in this context.” Id. at 2500. Fairness could mean creating the greatest number of competitive districts, districting to ensure that each party receives its proportional share of “safe” seats, or adhering to traditional districting criteria. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). And choosing between these different visions of fairness “poses basic questions that are political, not legal.” Id. Second, even if courts could agree on a standard of fairness, they would have to determine how much deviation from that standard in pursuit of partisan interests was permissible. Id. at 2501. Some amount of partisan gerrymandering is constitutional and inevitable. Id. at 2497. To hold that legislators could never consider partisan interests in districting “would essentially countermand the Framers’ decision to entrust districting to political entities.” Id. And in addition to the problem of deciding how much partisan intent is too much, complaints of partisan gerrymandering also present line-drawing problems concerning partisan effect—judges must decide “how much partisan dominance is too much.” Id. at 2498 (emphasis added) (internal quotation marks omitted). For example, to police partisan gerrymandering, courts would “have to decide the ideal number of seats for each party and determine at what point deviation from that balance went too 48 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 49 of 152 far.” Id. at 2501. Because the Constitution supplies neither an objective standard for the fair apportionment of political power nor any principled basis for identifying violations of that (nonexistent) standard, the Court concluded that complaints of partisan gerrymandering present nonjusticiable political questions. Id. at 2500–02. Under the reasoning of Rucho, complaints of partisan advantage based on ballot order are likewise nonjusticiable political questions. The voters and organizations’ complaint is based on the notion that Florida’s ballot statute, by virtue of the primacy effect, confers an unfair partisan advantage on the party that last won the Governorship. But courts cannot rely on legal standards to adjudicate this kind of complaint because it does not allege any burden on individual voting rights. Instead, adjudicating this kind of complaint would require courts to pick among various conceptions of a politically “fair” ballot order that have no basis in the Constitution. For that reason, the complaint “poses basic questions that are political, not legal.” Id. at 2500. And even if a judicially discernable and manageable standard for fairly ordering a ballot existed, there are no standards for determining how much of a departure from an ideal ballot order amounts to a constitutional violation. See id. at 2501. As we explain, Rucho cannot be persuasively distinguished from this appeal. 49 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 50 of 152 The basic problem with the voters and organizations’ complaint is that it is not based on the right to vote at all, so we cannot evaluate their complaint using the legal standards that apply to laws that burden the right to vote. As the voters and organizations correctly point out, we must evaluate laws that burden voting rights using the approach of Anderson and Burdick, which requires us to weigh the burden imposed by the law against the state interests justifying the law. Common Cause/Ga., 554 F.3d at 1352. But “we have to identify a burden before we can weigh it.” Crawford v. Marion Cty. Election Bd., 553 U.S. 181, 205 (2008) (Scalia, J., concurring in the judgment). And here it is impossible to identify a burden on voting rights imposed by the ballot statute that is susceptible to the balancing test of Anderson and Burdick. The statute at issue here is unlike any law that this Court or the Supreme Court has ever evaluated under Anderson and Burdick. The statute does not make it more difficult for individuals to vote, see, e.g., Crawford, 553 U.S. at 198 (plurality opinion) (photo-identification law); Common Cause/Ga., 554 F.3d at 1354 (same), or to choose the candidate of their choice, see Burdick, 504 U.S. at 430 (prohibition on write-in voting). It does not limit any political party’s or candidate’s access to the ballot, which would interfere with voters’ ability to vote for and support that party or candidate. See, e.g., Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party, 520 U.S. 351, 353–54, 358–59 (1997) (law forbidding individuals to appear 50 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 51 of 152 on the ballot as the candidate of more than one party); Norman v. Reed, 502 U.S. 279, 288–89 (1992) (ballot-access law for new parties); Munro v. Socialist Workers Party, 479 U.S. 189, 199 (1986) (ballot-access law for minor-party candidates); Anderson, 460 U.S. at 782, 786 (early filing deadline for candidate paperwork); Cowen v. Ga. Sec’y of State, 960 F.3d 1339, 1342–46 (11th Cir. 2020) (ballot-access law for minor-party candidates); Fulani v. Krivanek, 973 F.2d 1539, 1539, 1543 (11th Cir. 1992) (same). Nor does it burden the associational rights of political parties by interfering with their ability to freely associate with voters and candidates of their choosing. See, e.g., Wash. State Grange v. Wash. State Republican Party, 552 U.S. 442, 451–52 (2008); Clingman v. Beaver, 544 U.S. 581, 587, 593 (2005); Tashjian v. Republican Party of Conn., 479 U.S. 208, 213– 14 (1986). And to state the obvious, the statute certainly does not create the risk that some votes will go uncounted or be improperly counted. See, e.g., Lee, 915 F.3d at 1318–20 (challenge to signature-match procedures for absentee and provisional ballots); Wexler v. Anderson, 452 F.3d 1226, 1232 (11th Cir. 2006) (challenge to manual-recount procedures under which some ballots might “receive a different, and allegedly inferior, type of review in the event of a manual recount”). All the statute does is determine the order in which candidates appear in each office block on the ballot. 51 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 52 of 152 If the statute burdened voting or associational rights even slightly, we could apply legal standards to determine whether the burden was unconstitutional. Under Anderson and Burdick, we would weigh the burden imposed by the law against the state interests justifying that burden. See Common Cause/Ga., 554 F.3d at 1352. But because the statute does not burden the right to vote, we cannot engage in that kind of review. The voters and organizations ask us to decide not whether the ballot statute burdens identifiable voting or associational rights, but whether it confers an unfair partisan advantage on the Republican Party. Indeed, this is the very theory of injury on which our dissenting colleague relies to establish the standing of the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee under Article III. See Dissenting Op. at 74 (“Each committee experienced an injury in fact because the ballot-order statute has placed the Democratic Party at an enduring electoral disadvantage in Florida . . . .”). Instead of basing their complaint on individual voting or associational rights, the voters and organizations allege a novel complaint premised on the idea that the extra votes that flow from top ballot position should be distributed “fairly” between the major political parties. The “crux of [their] constitutional claim,” they explain, “is the way in which” the ballot statute distributes the primacy vote “between similarly-situated major parties.” In their view and the district court’s, 52 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 53 of 152 fairness means distributing the primacy vote either evenly between the major parties or on some apolitical basis, like random lottery or alphabetically by candidate last name. But sensible as those approaches might be, they are hardly the only ways to conceive of a “fair” ballot order. As in Rucho, “it is not even clear what fairness looks like in this context.” 139 S. Ct. at 2500. Instead of splitting the primacy effect between the two major parties, perhaps Florida should ensure that each political party on the ballot—including minor parties—has an equal number of its candidates listed first for office. After all, parties that have qualified to be on the ballot are similarly situated with respect to any right to be first on the ballot. Or, because that approach might give an undue advantage to minor parties with few supporters, perhaps Florida should distribute the primacy effect proportionately based on the number of registered voters in each party. That is, if 20 percent of registered voters belong to one political party, that party’s candidates should appear first on 20 percent of the ballots, and so on. Maybe Minnesota’s approach is fairest: award the primacy effect entirely to one party—the party that received the fewest votes in the last election. Minn. Stat. § 204D.13(2). One could imagine many other ballot schemes that plausibly claim to be the fairest way, or at least a fair way, to distribute the primacy effect, including the one Florida adopted nearly 53 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 54 of 152 70 years ago: giving all parties the chance to win the primacy effect at each gubernatorial election. As in the partisan gerrymandering context, picking among these alternatives “poses basic questions that are political, not legal.” Rucho, 139 S. Ct. at 2500. “There are no legal standards discernible in the Constitution for making such judgments, let alone limited and precise standards that are clear, manageable, and politically neutral.” Id. “Any judicial decision on what is ‘fair’ in this context would be an ‘unmoored determination’ of the sort characteristic of a political question beyond the competence of the federal courts.” Id. (quoting Zivotofsky v. Clinton, 566 U.S. 189, 196 (2012)). And even if courts could discern in the Constitution a standard of fairness for evaluating ballot-order regimes, they would run headlong into the second problem the Supreme Court identified in Rucho. There are no discernable and manageable standards “to answer the determinative question”: How much partisan advantage from ballot order is too much? See id. at 2501; see also id. at 2498 (asking “how much partisan dominance is too much” (internal quotation marks omitted)). It is impossible to ensure that each candidate or party in a particular election appears at the top of the ballot an equal number of times. Election officials cannot know in advance how many ballots will be cast in a given race, let alone how many ballots will be cast in each county or voting precinct or which counties 54 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 55 of 152 and precincts have the largest numbers of disinterested voters. Relatedly, how large must the primacy effect be to create a constitutional problem? Two percent of voters? Five percent? Some greater share? If the standard is an “outcome determinative” number of voters, then any disparity in allocating the primacy effect could violate the Constitution in close races. Would awarding the primacy effect to a single political party be constitutional in a noncompetitive State where it would make no difference to electoral outcomes but unconstitutional in a battleground State? As with partisan gerrymandering, even if courts “knew which version of fairness to be looking for, there are no discernible and manageable standards for deciding whether there has been a violation.” Id. at 2501. At bottom, the voters and organizations’ challenge to the ballot statute rests on the notion “that each party must be influential in proportion to its number of supporters.” Id. Their complaint is that some voters who are neither Democrats nor Republicans will vote for the Republican candidate solely because the Republican is listed first, giving Republicans an advantage beyond their actual number of supporters. But the Supreme Court has never accepted that baseline as providing a justiciable standard in any context. It has instead emphatically rejected the idea that federal courts are “responsible for vindicating generalized partisan preferences.” Id. (quoting Gill, 138 S. Ct. at 1933). 55 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 56 of 152 The federal judiciary’s “constitutionally prescribed role is to vindicate the individual rights of the people appearing before it.” Id. (quoting Gill, 138 S. Ct. at 1933). Where an election law does not burden the right to vote in any way, we cannot vindicate individual rights. And we “have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct [our] decisions.” Id. at 2507. The complaints of partisan gerrymandering in Rucho cannot be persuasively distinguished from the voters and organizations’ complaint. A complaint that the order in which candidates appear on a ballot confers an impermissible partisan advantage to one party presents a nonjusticiable political question. One possible response to the preceding analysis is that because the voters and organizations have not alleged any burden on voting rights, their complaint fails on the merits though it remains justiciable. But a complaint can both fail to state a constitutional violation and be nonjusticiable if there are no judicially discernible and manageable standards to adjudicate it. Take complaints of partisan gerrymandering. In the light of Rucho, we know that any complaint that a redistricting plan is unconstitutionally partisan must be dismissed as nonjusticiable—even if the challenged plan is so fair that it could not possibly violate the Constitution. Nor must a particular practice even be capable of 56 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 57 of 152 violating the Constitution for challenges to that practice to be nonjusticiable. Our guide, again, is Rucho. We do not know whether partisan gerrymandering can ever violate the Constitution; in its 46 years of attempting to adjudicate those complaints, the Supreme Court never declared a single redistricting plan unconstitutionally partisan. Id. at 2491, 2497–98, 2507. But even though partisan gerrymandering may not violate the Constitution, challenges to that practice are nonetheless nonjusticiable because they are unsuited for resolution by federal courts. Id. at 2507–08. The same is true for complaints of partisan advantage based on ballot order. The voters and organizations’ arguments that their complaint is justiciable are unconvincing. To make their case, they attempt to distinguish Rucho, invoke a host of inapposite precedents, and posit hypothetical laws that bear no resemblance to the challenged law in this action. None of their arguments have merit. The voters and organizations first suggest that Rucho is distinguishable because the Supreme Court searched for a judicially manageable standard to police partisan gerrymandering “for decades” without success. But Rucho makes clear that complaints of partisan gerrymandering have always been nonjusticiable; it did not impose a requirement that courts first struggle to identify a justiciable standard for some period of time before declaring a complaint nonjusticiable. Complaints of partisan gerrymandering did not become nonjusticiable only after the Court tried 57 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 58 of 152 and failed to develop a standard. See Lester v. United States, 921 F.3d 1306, 1312 (11th Cir. 2019) (W. Pryor, J., respecting the denial of rehearing en banc) (“[W]e should be mindful of the difference between a change in judicial doctrine and a change in law.” (emphasis added)). Instead, the Court’s inability to discern a manageable standard was evidence that these complaints had always been “outside the courts’ competence and therefore beyond the courts’ jurisdiction.” Rucho, 139 S. Ct. at 2494; see also Lester, 921 F.3d at 1313 (“Without distinguishing between judges’ understanding of the law and the law itself, . . . the Supreme Court [could not] meaningfully describe a past decision of its own as ‘wrong the day it was decided.’” (quoting Planned Parenthood of Se. Penn. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 863 (1992) (joint opinion of O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter, JJ.))). As discussed below, the judiciary’s experience with partisan ballot-order complaints provides similar evidence that no judicially discernible and manageable standards exist to adjudicate them—that is, that these complaints have always been nonjusticiable. The voters and organizations also argue that Rucho is distinguishable because some amount of partisan gerrymandering is constitutionally permissible in redistricting, but partisan considerations are off limits in the realm of election administration. And if partisan considerations are forbidden in election administration, that reality arguably eliminates the line-drawing problem the Supreme Court faced in Rucho—how much partisanship is too much? In the voters 58 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 59 of 152 and organizations’ view, any partisanship is too much partisanship in this context. Cf. Rucho, 139 S. Ct. at 2502 (explaining that complaints of racial gerrymandering can rightly ask “for the elimination of a racial classification” but that complaints of partisan gerrymandering “cannot ask for the elimination of partisanship”). This argument has at least two problems. First, partisan considerations are not entirely off limits in election administration. Partisan motivations do not doom a nondiscriminatory election law if “valid neutral justifications” also support the law. Crawford, 553 U.S. at 204 (plurality opinion); see also Common Cause/Ga., 554 F.3d at 1355. But even if partisan motivations were entirely off limits in election administration, that fact would not eliminate the line-drawing problems inherent in the voters and organizations’ complaint, which is based solely on the partisan effects of the ballot statute. The voters and organizations have never argued that the Democrat-led legislature and Democratic governor that enacted the statute were motivated by impermissible partisan intent. Their complaint does not ask for the elimination of partisan intent in ballot order. It asks for a fair allocation of the primacy vote, much like the complaints of partisan gerrymandering in Rucho asked for “a [fair] level of political power and influence.” 139 S. Ct. at 2499. The voters and organizations next contend that because other challenges to election regulations are justiciable, theirs must be too. They point to Williams v. Rhodes, 393 U.S. 23, 24, 28 (1968), which held that a challenge to laws that “made 59 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 60 of 152 it virtually impossible” for certain political parties to access the ballot was justiciable. But Williams provides no support for their position. Laws that limit the ability of candidates or parties to access the ballot burden “voters’ freedom of choice and freedom of association.” Anderson, 460 U.S. at 806 (emphasis added); see also Socialist Workers Party, 479 U.S. at 193 (explaining that ballot-access restrictions “impinge upon the rights of individuals to associate for political purposes, as well as the rights of qualified voters to cast their votes effectively”). Standards exist to assess the burdens imposed by restrictions on ballot access. See Socialist Workers Party, 479 U.S. at 193–99. But no standards exist to judge challenges to the partisan advantage conferred by ballot order. The voters and organizations contend that if we determine their complaint is nonjusticiable, other more nefarious ballot laws will be insulated from judicial review. They offer examples of hypothetical laws that require a “thumbs-up” or asterisk symbol next to candidates of the Governor’s party, or that require the names of those candidates to appear in larger font, bold print, or a different color. Because challenges to these laws should be justiciable, they argue, so also should challenges to laws that govern ballot order. Our holding that this lawsuit is nonjusticiable does not mean that challenges to these kinds of ballot laws are also nonjusticiable. The Elections Clause, which commits the regulation of the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections” to 60 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 61 of 152 state legislatures, U.S. Const. art. I, § 4, cl. 1, provides a judicially discernable and manageable standard to evaluate nonprocedural laws about ballot content. The Supreme Court has held that the Elections Clause establishes the boundaries of state authority over elections. See Cook v. Gralike, 531 U.S. 510, 523 (2001) (“[T]he States may regulate the incidents of such elections, including balloting, only within the exclusive delegation of power under the Elections Clause.”). In Cook, the Court invalidated a Missouri law that placed a pejorative designation next to candidates who refused to support term limits because the law did not regulate the time, place, or manner of elections but instead sought to disparage or endorse particular candidates. Id. at 523–26. “Thumbs-up” laws could be evaluated under that standard, as could other laws that arguably do not regulate the manner of elections, like laws that provide favorable font choices for certain candidates. But Cook and the Elections Clause provide no standard to evaluate laws that govern ballot order. Unlike the law at issue in Cook or a “thumbs-up” law, laws that govern ballot order plainly regulate the manner of elections and are within the power of States to enact. To use an Australian ballot, Florida, like every other State, necessarily had to decide the order in which candidates’ names appear on the ballot. And the choice of what order to adopt cannot be evaluated using legal standards because it “poses basic questions that are political, not legal.” Rucho, 139 S. Ct. at 2500. 61 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 62 of 152 One might think that holding the voters and organizations’ complaint to be nonjusticiable would mean that all challenges to ballot order are nonjusticiable, but that is not so. Rucho makes clear that one kind of challenge to a law can be justiciable and another nonjusticiable depending on whether judicially discernable and manageable standards exist to adjudicate the complaint. The Court explained that challenges to a redistricting plan based on racial gerrymandering or violations of the one-person, one-vote principle are justiciable because manageable standards exist to adjudicate those complaints, even though challenges to the same redistricting plan based on its partisan effects are nonjusticiable. See id. at 2501– 02. Similarly, if the voters and organizations’ complaint were that Florida’s ballot order somehow made it more difficult for Democrats to vote for their candidate of choice, their complaint would be justiciable, and we would have to weigh the burden imposed by the law against the State’s regulatory interests. See Burdick, 504 U.S. at 434; Common Cause/Ga., 554 F.3d at 1352. But that is not the kind of complaint the voters and organizations brought. They instead ask us to fairly apportion the primacy vote among the political parties, and that complaint falls squarely within Rucho’s definition of a political question. The voters and organizations also argue that the decisions of other courts adjudicating complaints of partisan advantage based on ballot order prove that their complaint is justiciable. But the relevant decisions all predate Rucho. See, e.g., 62 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 63 of 152 Libertarian Party of Va. v. Alcorn, 826 F.3d 708, 717 (4th Cir. 2016); Green Party of Tenn. v. Hargett, 767 F.3d 533, 550–51 (6th Cir. 2014); Koppell v. N.Y. State Bd. of Elections, 153 F.3d 95, 96 (2d Cir. 1998); McLain v. Meier, 637 F.2d 1159, 1167 (8th Cir. 1980); Sangmeister v. Woodard, 565 F.2d 460, 465 (7th Cir. 1977). And none of the decisions addressed whether complaints of partisan advantage based on ballot order are justiciable. More fundamentally, that courts have attempted to adjudicate a complaint does not mean the complaint is justiciable. Indeed, before Rucho, numerous lower courts had crafted some standard to adjudicate complaints of partisan gerrymandering. See Rucho, 139 S. Ct. at 2502– 06. Even taken on their own terms, these decisions support, rather than undermine, the conclusion that the voters and organizations’ complaint is nonjusticiable. They provide evidence that the voters and organizations’ complaint is inherently standardless, much as the many prior decisions attempting to adjudicate complaints of partisan gerrymandering did in Rucho. See id. at 2497–98. Because complaints of partisan advantage based on ballot order are not based on the right to vote at all, the courts in each of these decisions were forced to decide what constituted a fair method of allocating of the top ballot position and then determine whether the challenged law so departed from that standard of fairness that it violated the Constitution. 63 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 64 of 152 Unsurprisingly, the courts settled on different and sometimes contradictory standards. The Fourth Circuit, for example, concluded that “facially neutral and nondiscriminatory” ballot-order laws “impose[] only the most modest burdens” on voting and associational rights and for that reason survive scrutiny under Anderson and Burdick. Libertarian Party of Va., 826 F.3d at 717. The Eighth Circuit, in contrast, held that “position advantage must be eliminated as much as is possible” and decided that the “fairest remedy” was “some form of ballot rotation whereby ‘first position’ votes are shared equitably by all candidates.” McLain, 637 F.2d at 1169 (emphasis added). The Seventh Circuit did not require rotation of the top ballot spot among all candidates; instead, it held that laws governing ballot order pose no constitutional problem so long as they are “neutral” in character and do not intentionally favor one class of candidates over another. Sangmeister, 565 F.2d at 465–68. And at least one court has concluded that even a “neutral” method of assigning ballot position—alphabetically by candidate last name—violated the state constitutional rights of a candidate whose name would never allow him to appear at the top of the ballot. Kautenburger v. Jackson, 333 P.2d 293, 294–95 (Ariz. 1958). These decisions strengthen the conclusion that there are no judicially discernable and manageable standards for adjudicating complaints of partisan advantage based on ballot order. Such complaints present competing visions of fairness that are “unguided and ill suited to the development of judicial standards.” 64 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 65 of 152 Rucho, 139 S. Ct. at 2501 (internal quotation marks omitted). Federal judges have no business deciding them. The voters and organizations contend that the Supreme Court’s summary affirmance in Mann v. Powell, 398 U.S. 955 (1970) (mem.), establishes that their complaint is justiciable, but that is plainly wrong. The law at issue in Mann placed candidates on the ballot in the order they submitted their nominating petitions and gave the Illinois Secretary of State unfettered discretion to break ties if he received multiple petitions simultaneously. 314 F. Supp. 677, 678–79 (N.D. Ill. 1969), aff’d, 398 U.S. 955. When the Secretary received two or more petitions simultaneously, he chose to break the tie in favor of incumbents. Id. A three-judge district court enjoined that practice id. at 679, and the Supreme Court summarily affirmed, Mann, 398 U.S. at 955. But the Court has cautioned that we must not overread its summary affirmances: “the precedential effect of a summary affirmance extends no further than the precise issues presented and necessarily decided by those actions. A summary disposition affirms only the judgment of the court below, and no more may be read into our action than was essential to sustain that judgment.” Anderson, 460 U.S. at 784–85 n.5 (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Mandel v. Bradley, 432 U.S. 173, 176 (1977) (“Because a summary affirmance is an affirmance of the judgment only, the rationale of the affirmance may not be gleaned solely from the opinion below. When we summarily affirm, without 65 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 66 of 152 opinion, we affirm the judgment but not necessarily the reasoning by which it was reached.” (alteration adopted) (internal quotation marks omitted)). Mann provides no basis to conclude that the Supreme Court has ever adjudicated a complaint based on the partisan effects of ballot order. The dissent contends that our analysis of Mann must take into account the jurisdictional statement filed in that case. Dissenting Op. at 117–21. When a jurisdictional issue is “neither challenged nor discussed,” the Supreme Court’s exercise of its jurisdiction carries no precedential weight. Lewis v. Casey, 518 U.S. 343, 352 n.2 (1996). But, the dissent argues, when a party raises an issue in a jurisdictional statement, the Court’s summary affirmance rejects that specific challenge. Dissenting Op. at 117 (citing Mandel, 432 U.S. at 176). The dissent insists that although the jurisdictional issue in Mann was not discussed in the Supreme Court’s summary affirmance, it was still challenged by the Illinois Secretary of State. Id. at 118–19 (citing Jurisdictional Statement, Powell v. Mann, 1970 WL 155703 at  (1970)). As a result, the dissent says, we must treat Mann as precedent. But “the precedential effect of a summary affirmance extends no further than the precise issues presented,” Anderson, 460 U.S. at 784–85 n.5 (internal quotation marks omitted), and this case presents a question different from the one in Mann. The law at issue in Mann gave the Illinois Secretary of State unfettered discretion 66 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 67 of 152 to break ties, whereas the law here gives no such discretion. Because of this key distinction, we cannot say that the Court’s apparent conclusion in Mann—that a challenge to a discretionary ballot-ordering law that created no alleged partisan advantage is justiciable—has any bearing on a challenge to a non-discretionary ballot-ordering law that allegedly creates an unfair partisan advantage. In short, the dissent’s reliance on Mann is misplaced. Besides misreading the precedential value of Mann, the dissent also invents a threshold inquiry for evaluating potential political questions and contends that we have ignored this previously unrevealed test. Dissenting Op. at 122–23, 133. The Court held in Baker v. Carr that a challenge to a state reapportionment plan based on population inequality did not present a nonjusticiable political question because there was a “well developed and familiar” standard to evaluate such challenges— the Equal Protection Clause. 369 U.S. 186, 226 (1962). According to the dissent, Baker’s test is more lenient than the one used in Rucho, which requires there to be a judicial standard that rests on a “limited and precise rationale” and that is “clear, manageable, and politically neutral.” Dissenting Op. at 126 (quoting Rucho, 139 S. Ct. at 2498). The dissent distinguishes Baker and Rucho by asserting that Baker is the general test for political questions, whereas the heightened Rucho test should be used “when judicial review of the particular claim at issue would create separation of powers concerns.” Id. at 133. 67 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 68 of 152 The dissent’s attempt to create a new framework for choosing between different tests for political questions is misguided. Although it is true that Rucho did not overrule Baker, nothing in Rucho suggests that the Supreme Court’s test for the justiciability of challenges to partisan gerrymandering was an exception to a general test for other political questions. See Rucho, 139 S. Ct. at 2498–99. The reason the Court directed its analysis in Rucho toward partisan gerrymandering is that the claim in Rucho was about partisan gerrymandering. The dissent is trying to create a solution in search of a problem. The voters and organizations’ attempts to escape the reasoning of Rucho are all unavailing. Despite their many protests, Rucho compels the conclusion that complaints of unfair partisan advantage based on ballot order present nonjusticiable political questions. Although Rucho may seem counterintuitive to federal judges who are used to usurping the authority of state legislatures to regulate elections, it should not. The Constitution commits the “Times, Places and Manner” of holding congressional elections to legislatures—the state legislatures in the first instance, subject to any regulations Congress prescribes. U.S. Const. art. I, § 4, cl. 1. Our founding charter never contemplated that federal courts would dictate the manner of conducting elections—in this lawsuit, down to the order in which candidates appear on a ballot. 68 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 69 of 152 Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist 59 that “a discretionary power over elections ought to exist somewhere,” but that somewhere was not the federal judiciary. The Federalist No. 59, at 306 (Alexander Hamilton) (George W. Carey & James McClellan eds., 2001). Instead, Hamilton identified “only three ways in which this power could have been reasonably organized.” Id. It could be “lodged wholly in the national legislature, or wholly in the state legislatures, or primarily, in the latter, and ultimately in the former.” Id. The Constitution, of course, adopted the third option. But the district court in this action assumed for itself the “discretionary power over elections” that the Constitution assigns to the state and federal legislatures, in contravention of clear Supreme Court precedent that should have prevented it from reaching the merits of this dispute. Its decision to do so was error. We offer one final word about the dissenting opinion. Although it purports to dissent from our judgment vacating the injunction for lack of jurisdiction, the dissenting opinion never says whether it would affirm the injunction or on what grounds. So although the dissent argues this dispute is justiciable, it offers no clues about how to resolve the appeal.