Opinion ID: 3010129
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Equal Protection of the Laws

Text: The Pennsylvania election code facially discriminates between major and minor parties. The challenged statutes, 25 Pa. Stat. Ann. §§ 2936(e) and 2911(e)(5), operate to prevent crossnomination by minor parties, while 25 Pa. Stat. Ann. § 2870(f) allows the major parties to cross-nominate candidates for school director and other local offices. The Patriot Party alleges that this disparate treatment also violates the Party's Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection of the laws because it violates a non-discrimination principle enunciated by the Supreme Court in Williams v. Rhodes. See 393 U.S. at 32. Because neither Twin Cities nor Swamp involved a ban on cross-nomination that facially discriminated against minor parties, we examine for the first time in a fusion case the issues presented by the Patriot Party's equal protection claim. The district court held that Pennsylvania's election laws do not violate the Patriot Party's right to equal protection. Patriot Party, slip op. at 11. The court, applying the same balancing test that it applied to the free association claim, concluded that the defendants' legitimate interest in regulating [the] ballot and election process justifies the limited restraints placed upon plaintiff by the challenged provisions of the Election Code. Id. Appellees assert that the laws should be subject to rational basis review because they do not create an invidious, arbitrary, or irrational classification and do not apply to a suspect class. They argue that because the classification is rationally related to a legitimate government interest in regulating its ballot, it does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court's major precedent concerning the equal protection rights of political parties is Williams v. Rhodes, 393 U.S. 33 (1968). In Williams, Ohio election laws made it virtually impossible for new or small political parties to be placed on the state ballot for the selection of presidential and vice presidential candidates. Id. at 24. Thus, the challenged laws violated the constitutional guarantee of equal protection because they [gave] the two old, established parties a decided advantage over any new parties struggling for existence and . . . place[d] substantially unequal burdens on both the right to vote and the right to associate. Id. The Court characterized the nature of the equal protection burden imposed by the Ohio laws from the perspective of both voters and minor political parties. First, the Court noted that the election laws placed an unequal burden on voters who supported new or small political parties because those voters could not cast an effective vote for their party of choice. Id.at 31. Second, the election laws placed an unequal burden on minor political parties themselves because they were excluded from the ballot and thereby denied an equal opportunity to win votes. Id. The State election laws burdened protected constitutional rights because they operated to stifle the growth of . . . new parties working to increase their strength from year to year. Id. at 32. Against these burdens, the Court weighed Ohio's arguments in favor of its election laws. The State argued that its laws were necessary to promote the stability and integrity of the political system and for administrative efficiency. The Court examined each of the State's asserted interests in turn, and concluded that although states have broad powers to regulate voting, Ohio's laws constituted an invidious discrimination in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Id. at 31-34. From Williams, we can extrapolate the first principles and basic structure of our equal protection analysis. It is clear that no State may pass a law regulating elections that violates the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection of the laws. Williams, 393 U.S. at 29. Of course, the Equal Protection Clause does not make every minor difference in the application of laws to different groups a violation of our Constitution, id. at 30, but we will examine election laws to ensure that the distinctions or classifications that they create are not invidious under our precedent. Id.; Patriot Party of Pennsylvania v. Mitchell, 826 F. Supp. 926 (E.D.Pa. 1993) (citing Clements, 457 U.S. at 967), aff'd, 9 F.3d 1540 (3d Cir. 1993). In order to determine whether election laws violate the Equal Protection Clause, we must measure the totality of the burden that the laws place on the voting and associational rights of political parties and individual voters against the justifications that the State offers to support the law. Williams, 393 U.S. at 34. As the Supreme Court stated in Williams: In determining whether or not a state law violates the Equal Protection Clause, we must consider the facts and circumstances behind the law, the interests which the State claims to be protecting, and the interests of those who are disadvantaged by the classification. Id. at 30 (footnote omitted). Thus, our analysis of the Patriot Party's equal protection claim is similar in many respects to the balancing test that we applied to its free association claim. It is undisputed that the Pennsylvania election laws treat major and minor parties differently. Major parties that file nominating petitions and hold primaries are permitted to cross-nominate each other's candidates for school board, see 25 Pa. Stat. Ann. § 2870(f), while minor parties may not crossnominate any candidates, see 25 Pa. Stat. Ann. §§ 2936(e) and 2911(e)(5). The restriction in Williams, which prevented minor parties from appearing on the ballot, was undoubtedly a more severe burden on the rights of minor parties than the restriction imposed by the state election laws in this case. The Pennsylvania laws do not prevent minor parties from nominating most individuals or from placing their candidate on the ballot; they merely prevent minor parties from nominating the few candidates already nominated by other parties. But seediscussion supra at __ (discussing Norman v. Reed) [Typescript at 14-15]. Nevertheless, we believe that Pennsylvania's decision to ban cross-nomination by minor parties and to allow crossnomination by major parties constitutes the type of invidious discrimination prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment. Pennsylvania's decision to ban some consensual political alliances and not others burdens individuals who support a minor party's platform because it forces them to choose among three unsatisfactory alternatives: wasting a vote on a minor party candidate with little chance of winning, voting for a second- choice major party candidate, and not voting at all. This burden would be assuaged if minor political parties were accorded an equal right to cross-nominate willing major party candidates. The ban on cross-nomination by minor political parties also infringes on the the equal protection rights of political parties themselves. The challenged election laws may prohibit a minor party from nominating its best candidate and from forming a critical type of consensual political alliance that would help it to build support in the community. Thus, the challenged laws help to entrench the decided organizational advantage that the major parties hold over new parties struggling for existence. The ill effects of these laws are further magnified when the major parties elect to cross-nominate the same candidate, as they did in the school board election at issue. When the major parties cross-nominate a candidate, a minor party candidate must fight an uphill election battle against the combined strength of two well-organized and established major parties without even the prospect of forming its own ballot alliances. If a vote is wasted when it is cast for a minor party candidate running against two major party candidates, it is a fortiori wasted when the major parties unite behind one candidate. Such an arrangement is a significant burden on a minor party's right to equal protection of the laws. Moreover, Pennsylvania imposes these unequal burdens on the right to vote and the right to associate without protecting any significant countervailing state interest. As already noted, the ban on cross-nomination by minor parties is overly broad if it is intended merely to prevent sore loser candidacies. The other interests asserted by the Department on behalf of the Commonwealth simply do not bear scrutiny. See discussion supraat ___-___ [Typescript at 26-36]. Furthermore, many of the Department's arguments concerning ballot transparency and voter choice are undermined by the fact that the Commonwealth allows cross-nomination by the major political parties. Pennsylvania's election laws facially discriminate against minor political parties in a way that diminishes their ability to organize and to compete effectively in the political process. The Department offers no compelling justification for the Commonwealth's facially discriminatory laws. We hold, therefore, that these facially discriminatory laws create an invidious classification that violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.