Opinion ID: 2973599
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Voting-rights precedents

Text: In Gray v. Sanders, 372 U.S. 368 (1963), for example, the Supreme Court invalidated Georgia’s “county unit system” for counting votes in party primaries that were held to nominate candidates for the United States Senate and several state offices. Under the original county unit system, a resident in the least populous county in the state “had an influence in the nomination of candidates equivalent to 99 residents” of the state’s most populous county. Id. at 371. The state amended the system to increase the influence of the more populous counties, but the district court still found that “the vote of each citizen counts for less and less as the population of the county of his residence increases.” Id. at 372-73 (citation omitted). Articulating its famous “one person, one vote” standard, id. at 381, the Court held that the county-unit system violated the Equal Protection No. 05-3044 Stewart, et al. v. Blackwell, et al. Page 34 Clause because it gave “one person . . . twice or 10 times the voting power of another person in a statewide election merely because he lives in a rural area or because he lives in the smallest rural county[.]” Id. at 379. The Court, without announcing a standard of review, explained that the constitutional infirmity in the Georgia system inhered in the system’s failure to provide “equality of voting power.” Id. at 381. Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 U.S. 1 (1964), also cited by the majority, is not even an equal protection case. The Wesberry Court did not hold, as the majority states, that “Equal Protection requires substantial equality of population amongst the districts established by state legislatures for the election of members to the United States House of Representatives.” Maj. Op. at 12 (emphasis added). To the contrary, the Court relied exclusively on two sections found in Article I of the Constitution, stating explicitly that it did not need to “reach the arguments that the Georgia statute violates the Due Process, Equal Protection and Privileges and Immunities Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.” 376 U.S. at 8 n.10; see also Daniel Hays Lowenstein & Richard L. Hasen, Election Law: Cases and Materials 113 (2d ed. 2001) (“Wesberry was not decided under the Equal Protection Clause but under Article I, §§ 2 and 4 of the Constitution, and was thus applicable only to the United States House of Representatives.”). Article I, §§ 2 and 4 of the Constitution, the Court held, barred states from drawing congressional districts in which “a vote is worth more in one district than in another.” Id. at 8. Because it never addressed the plaintiff’s equal protection challenge, the Court did not need to—and did not—articulate the appropriate standard of review. The pathbreaking decision in Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964), marked the first time that the Court announced a standard of review similar to the strict-scrutiny standard currently applied in reviewing laws that discriminate against suspect classes or infringe on certain constitutionally protected rights. See id. at 562 (“[A]ny alleged infringement of the right of citizens to vote must be carefully and meticulously scrutinized.”). Again, however, the Court announced this standard in a case that dealt with the “weighting of votes;” specifically, unequally populated state legislative districts. See Lowenstein & Hasen, supra, at 105, 114; Reynolds, 377 U.S. at 563 (“Overweighting and overvaluation of the votes of those living here has the certain effect of dilution and undervaluation of the votes of those living there.”). Although it invalidated Alabama’s legislative apportionment plan and held that both houses in a bicameral state legislature must be apportioned on a “substantially equal population basis,” the Court did not do so on the ground that the law was not narrowly tailored to further a compelling governmental interest, see, e.g., Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, 515 U.S. 200, 235 (1995), but instead because the existing apportionment plan violated the “one person, one vote” principle—that “the weight of a citizen’s vote cannot be made to depend on where he lives.” Reynolds, 377 U.S. at 567 (emphasis added). The two other cases subjecting state voting practices to strict scrutiny cited by the majority are likewise inapposite. In Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663, 668 (1966), the Court invalidated the applicable laws of the four remaining states that charged a poll tax to vote in state elections. The Court applied strict scrutiny in Harper, citing Reynolds for the proposition that, “where fundamental rights and liberties are asserted under the Equal Protection Clause, classifications [that] might invade or restrain them must be closely scrutinized and carefully confined.” Id. at 670. Virginia’s poll tax, the Court reasoned, determined the qualifications of voters on the basis of wealth, a ground that is “traditionally disfavored,” id. at 668, and was therefore unconstitutional. The second of the two cases is Dunn v. Blumstein, 405 U.S. 330, 334 (1972), where the Court struck down Tennessee’s requirement that, in order to qualify as a registered voter, a person must have resided in the state for at least one year and in the county for at least three months. Strict scrutiny was the appropriate standard of review, the Court held, because the durational-residency requirement affected two fundamental rights—the right to vote and the right to travel. See id. at 338 (explaining that strict scrutiny applied, despite an earlier durational-residency-requirement case No. 05-3044 Stewart, et al. v. Blackwell, et al. Page 35 using a less stringent standard of review, because the Tennessee law “penaliz[ed]” only people who had recently exercised their right to travel). Dunn is therefore unique because the Court faced a state law that impinged on two fundamental rights protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Indeed, courts since Dunn have emphasized the importance of both the Tennessee law’s impact on two constitutionally protected activities and Dunn’s status as a voter-qualification precedent. See, e.g., Donatelli v. Mitchell, 2 F.3d 508, 515 (3d Cir. 1993) (explaining that the Court in Dunn reviewed a law that both denied access to the ballot and “directly burdened citizens’ fundamental constitutional right to travel”); Greidinger v. Davis, 988 F.2d 1344, 1349 (4th Cir. 1993) (classifying Dunn as a case “involving voter qualifications and ballot access”). Stated simply, none of these Supreme Court precedents resembles the claim made by the plaintiffs in the present case. These plaintiffs do not allege that Ohio has imposed an impermissible voter-qualification requirement, as in Harper and Dunn. Nor do they argue that the votes in Ohio are “weighted” differently—that is, that a properly marked ballot “is worth more in one district than in another.” Wesberry, 376 U.S. at 8; see also Reynolds, 377 U.S. at 563. Instead, they maintain that voters in counties that employ inferior voting equipment “are subjected to a significantly greater risk that their votes will not be counted.” In other words, properly marked ballots are counted and accorded the same value everywhere in the state, but voters in some counties have a reduced chance of turning in a properly marked ballot that will actually be counted because certain voting methods do not catch the voters’ own inadvertent mistakes. This challenge to the nuts-and-bolts of election administration, regardless of its merit, cannot be equated with either discriminatory voter-qualification requirements or generally applicable state laws that deny “equality of voting power,” Gray, 372 U.S. at 381, which are the principal types of state actions that the Supreme Court has subjected to strict scrutiny. See generally Richard L. Hasen, Bush v. Gore and the Future of Equal Protection Law in Elections, 29 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 377, 393 (2001) (explaining that the Warren Court precedents govern only the equal opportunity to vote and the equal weighting of votes, not “equality in the procedures and mechanisms used for voting”).