Opinion ID: 2973599
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: the help america vote act (hava)

Text: If the end result of the majority’s holding is a requirement that all Ohio counties adopt some form of notice technology, then Congress has beaten my colleagues to the punch. Key provisions of HAVA impose detailed notice-technology requirements on states receiving federal funds for election administration, whether those states employ lever, optical-scan, or DRE voting systems. See 42 U.S.C. § 15481(a)(1)(A) (2005). HAVA stops short, however, of banning the use of paper and punch-card ballots, explicitly permitting such ballots to be used so long as the state establishes a voter education program to explain the possibility of voter error, and provides instructions on how to correct those errors prior to the casting of a ballot. Id. § 15481(a)(1)(B); see also id. § 15481(c)(2) (preserving a state’s power to use paper ballots in federal elections). Punch-card voting systems thus survive HAVA even though, as the district court recognized, a primary “purpose of the Act was to provide federal funds to replace punch card voting systems.” Stewart, 356 F. Supp. 2d at 792 n.1. No. 05-3044 Stewart, et al. v. Blackwell, et al. Page 46 As one would expect, HAVA has become a focal point for election litigation, spawning a series of lawsuits in this court and the district courts within the circuit. See, e.g., Sandusky County Democratic Party v. Blackwell, 387 F.3d 565 (6th Cir. 2004) (per curiam); White v. Blackwell, 409 F. Supp. 2d 919 (N.D. Ohio 2006); Bay County Democratic Party v. Land, 347 F. Supp. 2d 404 (E.D. Mich. 2004). These suits generally seek enforcement of obligations recently imposed by Congress on those states that choose to accept federal funds for election administration. The present suit, in contrast, eschews the significant but balanced changes mandated by HAVA, and instead seeks a broad constitutional rule. But because HAVA is coextensive with the majority’s constitutional rule in so far as both require that participating states like Ohio implement some form of a notice system, that constitutional rule is unnecessary. Ohio’s compliance with HAVA will give the plaintiffs substantially all the relief that they claim to seek. What concerns me about the majority’s decision, therefore, is not the effect that the equal protection holding will have on election practices in Ohio in the upcoming November elections. Rather, I am troubled by two other aspects of the decision. The first is that the majority has inscribed its preferred principles of federal election law into the Constitution, thereby taking critical decisions out of the hands of government officials more familiar with the realities of the problems and the possible solutions. This course of action should be especially disfavored at a time when the democratic process—through HAVA and the discussions and debates engendered by that legislation—has responded with a national plan that still allows for variations among states and localities. My second concern stems from the uncertain scope of the majority’s equal protection holding, which I explored in Part III above. HAVA requires that states employ some type of a notice system, regardless of the voting equipment used. But, as I have demonstrated, the majority’s holding might render even some notice systems unconstitutional if other notice systems are found to have a substantially lower residual vote-rate. That is to say, the majority’s novel interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause sweeps far more broadly than does HAVA, and threatens to eliminate the ability of state and local governments to experiment with procedures and technology that maximize security, minimize cost, and make the voting process as inclusive as it should be. Cf. New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 285 U.S. 262, 311 (1932) (Brandeis, J., dissenting) (“There must be power in the states and the nation to remould, through experimentation, our . . . practices and institutions to meet changing social and economic needs.”). I therefore cannot join the majority’s decision to declare unconstitutional the use of different voting technologies across the state of Ohio.