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

Heading: equal protection analysis and bush v. gore

Text: As I have explained above, neither the venerable Warren Court precedents nor current Supreme Court voting-rights cases support either the majority’s decision to subject the challenged voting practices to strict scrutiny or the majority’s conclusion that those practices are unconstitutional. What actually provides the analytical basis for the majority opinion, then, is the No. 05-3044 Stewart, et al. v. Blackwell, et al. Page 38 Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore and a series of lower-court cases that have purported to adopt the reasoning of that decision. For the reasons ably articulated by a leading election-law expert—reasons to which I will add a few thoughts of my own—I believe that we should heed the Supreme Court’s own warning and limit the reach of Bush v. Gore to the peculiar and extraordinary facts of that case. See Hasen, Bush v. Gore and the Future of Equal Protection Law in Elections, 29 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. at 379 (“Language in the per curiam opinion limits [the holding] to the facts of the case, or, at most, to cases where jurisdiction-wide recounts are ordered.”). The majority has chosen a different path, one that unjustifiably expands Bush v. Gore into a landmark precedent designed to fundamentally transform federal election law. A. Bush v. Gore should not be given an expansive reading Professor Hasen summarized his three “reasons for doubting Bush v. Gore’s precedential value” as follows: [T]he limiting language in the opinion, the lack of seriousness with which the Court undertook its own analysis, and the inconsistency with other jurisprudence by this majority of Justices all point in the direction of assuming that Bush v. Gore is not good precedent for an expansive reading of equal protection law in elections. Id. at 391. I will focus on the first two of these reasons. In its per curiam opinion, the Court majority cautioned that its analysis was “limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities.” Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. at 109. The Court elaborated as follows: The question before [us] is not whether local entities, in the exercise of their expertise, may develop different systems for implementing elections. Instead, we are presented with a situation where a state court with the power to assure uniformity has ordered a statewide recount with minimal procedural safeguards. When a court orders a statewide remedy, there must be at least some assurance that the rudimentary requirements of equal treatment and fundamental fairness are satisfied. Id.; see also id. at 134 (Souter, J., dissenting) (“It is true that the Equal Protection Clause does not forbid the use of a variety of voting mechanisms within a jurisdiction, even though different mechanisms will have different levels of effectiveness in recording voters’ intentions[.]”); Vikram David Amar, Adventures in Direct Democracy: The Top Ten Constitutional Lessons from the California Recall Experience, 92 Cal. L .Rev. 927, 955 (2004) (explaining that the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore “explicitly disavowed” the notion that “the Equal Protection Clause . . . invalidates any statewide election where different kinds of voting machinery throughout the state may lead to nontrivial differential error rates across counties”). In the present case, of course, no state-court order is at issue, and no governmental entity has ordered a “statewide remedy.” The allegations of these plaintiffs are a far cry from the lack of uniform rules for discerning the meaning of votes already cast, which is what the Court in Bush v. Gore found to be a constitutional violation. See Hasen, 29 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. at 384 (explaining that the Bush v. Gore majority identified the Florida Supreme Court’s failure to formulate uniform rules for determining voter intent as the reason the state court’s recount procedures violated the Equal Protection Clause). These significant differences alone constitute a “legitimate basis [and] principled manner of distinguishing Bush v. Gore.” See Maj. Op. at 27. Since Professor Hasen’s article, the Supreme Court has had ample opportunity to prove him wrong by explaining, or even citing to, its decision in Bush v. Gore. See, e.g., Clingman v. Beaver, 544 U.S. __, 125 S. Ct. 2029 (2005); Vieth v. Jubelirer, 541 U.S. 267 (2004); McConnell v. Fed. Election Comm’n, 540 U.S. 93 (2003); Georgia v. Ashcroft, 539 U.S. 461 (2003). But despite taking No. 05-3044 Stewart, et al. v. Blackwell, et al. Page 39 a steady load of election-related cases, the Court has not cited Bush v. Gore even once—not in a majority opinion, in a concurrence, or in a dissent—in the more than five years since that case was decided. The Court, in other words, has adhered to the limiting language that it conspicuously included in the Bush v. Gore opinion. I believe that we should follow the same path. Bush v. Gore also provides little support for the majority’s conclusion that a decision by a state or local government to employ certain voting technology must be subjected to strict scrutiny. As Professor Hasen has explained, the Bush v. Gore Court described voting as a fundamental right, but did not “even bother[] to undertake” the “hornbook” analysis of asking whether the state’s interest in meeting an impending federal election deadline was “compelling” enough to overcome the fundamental right of voters to have their vote counted. See Hasen, 29 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. at 389. I am not convinced that the Court’s unexplained citation to Reynolds and Harper can be read as displacing the Burdick framework and instructing lower courts to employ strict scrutiny, particularly when the Court itself neither applied that standard nor articulated any standard of review. An expansive reading of Bush v. Gore portends problems far graver than simply a heightened standard of review. Professor Hasen has convincingly shown that Bush v. Gore applied the Equal Protection Clause to an area of election law entirely different from prior caselaw, but did so without explaining “which kinds of procedures and mechanisms used for voting constitute arbitrary and disparate treatment that value one person’s vote over another” and therefore violate the Constitution. Hasen, 29 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. at 393 (quotation marks omitted). The absence of guidance on these crucial matters leaves lower courts to evaluate for themselves not just the jurisprudential complexities that arise in election law cases of first impression, but also the potential policy implications of extending a Supreme Court precedent whose rationale is far from clear. Those policy implications, in my view, counsel strongly against extending the rationale of Bush v. Gore to the distinct area of voting technology. Professor Hasen has focused on three significant concerns, beyond the obvious monetary ones, raised by constitutionalizing local governments’ choice of voting mechanisms. The first is that doing so “eases the way for federal court intervention in state and local elections over nuts-and-bolts disputes better left to local authorities.” Id. at 400. Like Judge Posner, I do not think that the Court meant to invite more legal challenges to election methods and results. See Richard A. Posner, Florida 2000: A Legal and Statistical Analysis of the Election Deadlock and the Ensuing Litigation, 2000 Sup. Ct. Rev. 1, 41 (2001) (“The last thing we need is more election litigation.”). This first concern gives rise to the second one—namely, that a federal constitutional rule on voting technology “undermines federalism” by imposing a uniform national standard on localities that might otherwise allocate their resources in a different yet equally just manner. See Hasen, 29 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. at 401 (“Bush v. Gore is tantamount to a holding that the purchase of ambulances by a very poor county is less important than a move from punch cards to optical scanners.”). Professor Hasen’s third concern, however, is what I see as the most important downside to extending Bush v. Gore to voting technology. See id. at 401 (reading Bush v. Gore as creating “disincentive[s] . . . for jurisdictions to experiment with new methods of voting”). If the Equal Protection Clause bars one county in a state from adopting a new voting mechanism simply because the new mechanism may create a disparity between that county and its neighbors, local officials will have little incentive to innovate. The reason is simple: each time a county implements a change in equipment, it risks becoming party to a lawsuit alleging disparities in voters’ chances of properly completing a ballot and having that ballot counted. Because of this powerful disincentive to innovate, Bush v. Gore, absent other legislative solutions, might “have the unintended effect of freezing our voting mechanics at the current level of technology.” Id. at 402. I will return to this point in Part III below. No. 05-3044 Stewart, et al. v. Blackwell, et al. Page 40 In the final analysis, I believe that the best course is to understand the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore as a shield to preserve the status quo in an electoral process beset by extraordinary temporal and political pressures. I therefore decline to join the majority in permitting litigants to use that decision as a sword to strike down state election policies that, while ripe for improvement, were previously on solid constitutional ground. See Posner, 2000 Sup. Ct. Rev. at 41 (explaining that differences in the technology and vote-counting methods used by counties “had not previously been thought to deny equal protection of the laws”). In reaching this conclusion, I am not, as the majority charges, making the nonsensical claim that Professor Hasen’s law review article has overruled Bush v. Gore. See Maj. Op. at 26. I am instead faithfully following the Supreme Court’s explicit admonition in its decision that the analysis employed was “limited to the present circumstances.” Bush, 531 U.S. at 109. Lost in the majority’s rebuttal to my dissent is the recognition of a key aspect of Bush v. Gore that we all agree is clear: the Court’s unequivocal statement that it was not announcing a general rule for future cases. See Maj. Op. at 14 n.9 (acknowledging the Court’s limiting language). Unlike my colleagues, I cannot look past the Court’s own words and attribute to the Court the intention—in a per curiam opinion issued one day after oral argument in the midst of a national crisis—to revolutionize the election laws and practices of this country. B. Other lower courts have improperly expanded the reach of Bush v. Gore This is not the first case in which plaintiffs have utilized Bush v. Gore as their principal tool for effecting change in electoral policy. See Steven J. Mulroy, Lemonade from Lemons: Can Advocates Convert Bush v. Gore Into a Vehicle for Reform?, 9 Geo. J. on Poverty L. & Pol’y 357, 358-59 (2002) (citing various cases, all filed in the wake of Bush v. Gore, that challenge the use of certain voting methods under the Equal Protection Clause and the Voting Rights Act). The majority bases much of its analysis on the strength of these test cases, including Black v. McGuffage, 209 F. Supp. 2d 889 (N.D. Ill. 2002), and Common Cause v. Jones, 213 F. Supp. 2d 1106 (C.D. Cal. 2001). Maj. Op. at 16-20; see Mulroy, 9 Geo. J. on Poverty L. & Pol’y at 358-60 (citing Black and Common Cause as cases that “voting rights advocates” filed in an attempt “to use [Bush v. Gore] to push for long overdue electoral reform, by invoking the very equal protection theory relied on by the conservative Bush majority”). Like the district court below, however, I find these cases unpersuasive. The chief weakness of these cases is their reliance on the per curiam opinion in Bush v. Gore as the primary basis for their decisions. See Southwest Voter Registration Educ. Project v. Shelley, 344 F.3d 882, 894 (9th Cir.) (per curiam) (Shelley I), rev’d en banc, 344 F.3d 914 (9th Cir. 2003) (per curiam) (Shelley II); Black, 209 F. Supp. 2d at 898; Common Cause, 213 F. Supp. 2d at 1109. For the reasons set forth in Part II.A. above, I do not view Bush v. Gore as a landmark precedent designed to vastly extend the reach of the Equal Protection Clause. The case that most openly relies on Bush v. Gore is the Ninth Circuit’s now-vacated panel decision in Shelley I. In an opinion that looks and sounds strikingly like that of the majority in the present case, a panel of the Ninth Circuit enjoined the use of punch-card ballots in the 2003 gubernatorial recall election in California. 344 F.3d at 888. The theory of the California plaintiffs, which is identical to the one advanced by the Ohio plaintiffs in this case, was “that using error-prone voting equipment in some counties, but not in others[,] will result in votes being counted differently among the counties.” Id. at 895. Describing the plaintiffs’ allegations as stating “a classic voting rights equal protection claim,” id. at 895, the panel concluded that the plaintiffs had “demonstrated a sufficient likelihood of success on the merits regardless” of whether strict scrutiny or rational basis was the appropriate standard of review. Id. at 900. Success on the merits was likely, in the panel’s view, because the plaintiffs’ claim “present[ed] almost precisely the same issue as the [Supreme] Court considered in Bush,” where the Court found an Equal Protection violation. Id. at 895. Within No. 05-3044 Stewart, et al. v. Blackwell, et al. Page 41 a week of the panel’s decision, however, the Ninth Circuit granted en banc review, vacated the panel opinion, and unanimously reached a conclusion opposite to that of the panel. Shelley II, 344 F.3d at 917, 920. Despite the rather firm rebuke that the en banc court dealt the panel decision in Shelley I, the majority insists that the Ninth Circuit “did not reject outright the Equal Protection argument pursuant to the Bush v. Gore rationale . . . .” Maj. Op. at 19. I concede that the rejection was not “outright,” but the en banc court’s description of the panel’s rationale as “one over which reasonable jurists may differ” can hardly be construed as a ringing endorsement of Bush v. Gore’s precedential value or its application to the issue of variations in voting technology. Shelley II, 344 F.3d at 918. At the very least, the Ninth Circuit’s unanimous decision in Shelley II divested the panel decision of whatever precedential value it otherwise would have had. Undeterred, the majority struggles to accord such value to Shelley I because the rationale adopted by the majority is virtually identical to the one provided by the Shelley I panel—namely, that the plaintiffs’ novel equal protection claims are controlled by Supreme Court precedents that mandate the equal weighting of votes. Compare Maj. Op. at 23-24 (holding that the counties’ use of outdated technology “results in the weighting of votes differently”), with Shelley I, 344 F.3d at 894-95 (describing the plaintiffs’ contention “that a vote cast in Los Angeles or San Diego is entitled to the same weight as a vote cast in San Francisco”). As I explained in Part I.A. above, however, the plaintiffs are not asserting that one properly marked and tabulated vote has less value than another, but instead that certain technologies decrease a voter’s chance of handing in a properly marked ballot that will then be tabulated. This claim, when properly characterized, does not fall within the ambit of Gray, Wesberry, Reynolds, or any of the Supreme Court’s caselaw establishing the right to an equally-weighted vote. Stripped of their connection to longstanding Supreme Court precedent, the majority opinion and Shelley I are persuasive only to the extent that Bush v. Gore is controlling. Neither opinion, in my view, successfully refutes the compelling reasons supplied by Professor Hasen for refusing to “take Bush v. Gore’s equal protection holding seriously.” Hasen, 29 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. at 380. What I believe makes the majority’s opinion even more troubling than that of the Ninth Circuit panel is its failure to articulate precisely which aspects of Ohio’s voting system violate the Equal Protection Clause, and what state and local officials should do in the future to ameliorate the perceived constitutional problems. I turn now to these concerns.