Opinion ID: 457052
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Avoiding Voter Confusion

Text: 89 The second interest articulated by the State in defense of its closed primary law is the need to avoid confusion among voters. The State maintains that, as a necessary concomitant of preferential ballot access, it may ensure that the candidate who wins a party primary accurately represents the views of the party members, and not those of an amorphous group of unaligned voters. The State premises its argument on the assumption that many voters rely on partisan labels as shorthand for particular ideologies, and thus presume that a candidate in the general election running under a party banner espouses the views generally held by party members, 27 see N. Nie, S. Verba & J. Petrock, The Changing American Voter 47-56 (1976), Martin Van Buren, Inquiry Into the Origin and Course of Political Parties in the United States 6, 226 (1867). Arguing that such reliance is widespread, the State claims it has an interest in protecting voters from confusion. Even if this interest were deemed legitimate, a state certainly does not have a compelling interest in shielding from confusion those voters who engage in unthinking and Pavlovian reliance on party labels. Cf. Williams v. Rhodes, supra, 393 U.S. at 32, 89 S.Ct. at 11. Moreover, the State's position necessarily presumes a duty to define the composition of political parties in such a way as to clarify the political and ideological distinctions between them. In effect, Connecticut professes to have a compelling interest in deciding the ideological slant and bases of support for a political party. Most decidedly, however, it is the prerogative of the political party--and not the state--to determine whether it should be structured as a broad-based, relatively non-ideological organization or as a closely-knit, strongly ideological unit. The mere incantation of a talismanic phrase such as voter confusion cannot transform a specious interest into a compelling one.