Court Opinion

ID: 9427462
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:20:53.390602+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:07.388203
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Stevens,
concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
Placing additional names on a ballot adds to the cost of conducting elections and tends to confuse voters. The State therefore has a valid interest in limiting access to the ballot to serious candidates. If that interest is adequately served by a 25,000-signature requirement in a statewide election, the same interest cannot justify a larger requirement in a smaller election.
Nonetheless, I am not sure that the disparity evidences a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. The constitutional requirement that Illinois govern impartially would be implicated by a rule that discriminates, for example, between Socialists and Republicans or between Catholics and Protestants. But I question whether it has any application to rules prescribing different qualifications for different political offices. Rather than deciding that question, I would simply hold that legislation imposing a significant interference with access to the ballot must rest on a rational predicate. This legislative remnant is without any such support. It is either a product of a malfunction of the legislative process or merely a byproduct of this Court’s decision in Moore v. Ogilvie, 394 U. S. 814, see post, at 190-191 (Rehnquist, J., concurring in judgment) . In either event, I believe it has deprived appellees of their liberty without the “due process of lawmaking” that the *190Fourteenth Amendment requires. Cf. Delaware Tribal Business Committee v. Weeks, 430 U. S. 73, 98 (Stevens, J., dissenting).
For these reasons I concur in the Court’s judgment and in Parts I, II, and IV of its opinion.