Court Opinion

ID: 9469841
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:50:14.209472+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:38:52.697083
License: Public Domain

CUDAHY, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
The majority concedes that the “25 percent [signature] requirement” presents to citizens sponsoring advisory questions a “Sisyphean task,” and a “hurdle ... nearly impossible to leap, at least in DuPage County.” Ante at 299. This concession notwithstanding, the majority concludes that, since plaintiffs have no fundamental right to put advisory questions on the bal*303lot, the state — having ostensibly granted such a right1 — is free to make it wholly illusory. This conclusion defies common sense. A state cannot simultaneously provide an avenue of political expression and burden its use with conditions that, as the majority concedes, can never be met.
In fact, the district court (which agreed that there was no fundamental first amendment right to place advisory questions on the ballot) properly struck down the 25 percent signature requirement as patently excessive. The district court erred, however, in denying plaintiffs any relief since it went on to find that the three question limit validly precluded them from the ballot. But this limit, even if valid in some different context, cannot fairly be applied to these plaintiffs who no doubt delayed submitting their petitions until the deadline, August 16, 1982, in the hope of somehow meeting the grossly excessive 25 percent signature requirement.
Further, I believe that the three question limit, combined with the first-come-first-served principle and the fact that local governing bodies can put questions on the ballot with a simple resolution,2 makes it both possible and likely that the County Board will preempt the ballot spaces at its whim. And the Board can render the rights of private citizens who have obtained sufficient signatures, especially those citizens who espouse controversial causes, quite meaningless. For example, in 1980, the County Board met one day prior to the filing deadline for ballot questions and approved, in a span of about fifteen minutes, eleven questions for the November 1980 ballot. The next day, when citizen groups brought in five petitions (with sufficient signatures3) proposing ballot questions on property tax reductions, they learned that the three available spaces had already been taken by the Board.
Finally, I know of no authority for the proposition that questions initiated by the County Board are somehow presumed to be better endowed with “democratic legitimacy” than those springing directly from the people. It seems to me that the relative degrees of “democratic legitimacy” of the questions can only be guessed from the turnout on election day — if, of course, the citizens’ propositions ever make it to the ballot. Therefore, in view of the Supreme Court’s concern that systems regulating access to forums for first amendment expression have adequate safeguards, Southeastern Promotion, Ltd. v. Conrad, 420 U.S. 546, 95 S.Ct. 1239, 43 L.Ed.2d 448 (1975), the three question limit as presently applied must also be invalidated.
The legislative scheme presented here distinguishes among three groups: citizens sponsoring advisory questions, citizens sponsoring binding questions, and local governing bodies who may sponsor both advisory and binding questions. The state has distinguished among these groups in the way in which they can get their questions on the ballot. At a minimum, we must consider whether “the varying treatment ... is so unrelated to the achievement of any combination of legitimate purposes that we can only conclude that the legislature’s actions were irrational.” Vance v. Bradley, 440 U.S. 93, 97, 99 S.Ct. 939, 942, 59 L.Ed.2d 171 (1979).
The district court found that the 25 percent rule excessively burdens “the very right which the legislature has created.” 546 F.Supp. 469, 477. Indeed, the majority admits that the requirement has the “practical effect” of “keeping all [citizen-sponsored] advisory questions off the ballot .... ” Ante at 301.4 Thus, the 25 percent *304rule if upheld, serves to deny the very access to the advisory question system that the statute simultaneously purports to grant.
The state argues that the 25 percent rule is a reasonable means of ensuring that citizen-sponsored advisory questions hold sufficient interest for the community. Brief of Intervening Appellee at 42. In other words, the objective of the 25 percent rule is to maintain the integrity of the advisory question system lest it become cluttered by “interest groups espousing issues ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, all clamouring for a place on the ballot and their day in the public limelight.” Id.
Though the state’s objective is legitimate, it has chosen wholly irrational means to achieve it. In the name of preserving the advisory question system, the state “keep[s] all [citizen sponsored] advisory questions off the ballot.” Ante at 301 (emphasis supplied). This circuit recently rejected an Illinois election statute (employing similar overkill) as an irrational means to a legitimate end. In Richards v. Lavelle, 620 F.2d 144 (7th Cir. 1980) (per curiam), a candidate and his supporters challenged an attempt by the Election Commission to deny the candidate a place on the ballot because he submitted more signatures on his nominating petition than the maximum permitted by Illinois law. The court accepted the validity of a limit on signatures, but it found the means of enforcing the limit — removal — unconstitutional: “the method chosen ... does not serve in any rational way the administrative efficiency interest which the state legitimately asserts .. .. ” Id. at 149. Rational responses to the problem could have included such actions as returning the excess petitions or refusing to consider any signatures beyond the statutory maximum. Id. at 148. Similarly, the state here has chosen an irrational means, effective preclusion of all citizen-sponsored advisory questions, to a legitimate end, maintenance of an orderly advisory question system for the benefit of citizens and local governing boards who wish to sponsor advisory questions.
The majority attempts to impose rationality on the 25 percent rule by seeing it not as an attempt to maintain an orderly ballot, but rather as in effect “an oblique way of keeping all advisory questions off the ballot.” Ante at 301. In other words, we are to believe that the state, though it expressly stated otherwise,5 never intended to grant citizens any access to the advisory question system and that the 25 percent rule was a rational means of effecting this denial. In order to accept this remarkable proposition, we must ignore, at the very least, the canon of statutory interpretation that a statute should be interpreted so as to give effect to all its provisions. This is so because the majority’s interpretation of the 25 percent rule renders meaningless § 28-6, which states that citizen groups shall indeed have access to the ballot for advisory questions.
More importantly, even if this were the legislature’s intent in adopting the 25 percent rule, we should be loath to sanction such a tactic. By appearing to grant a benefit with the one hand while covertly withdrawing it with the other, the legislature easily circumvents “those political processes which can ordinarily be expected to bring about repeal of undesirable legislation.” United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 U.S. 144, 152-53 at n.4, 58 S.Ct. 778, 783-784 at n.4, 82 L.Ed. 1234 (1938).6 Though the government may not be required “to create a well informed citizenry,” ante at 300, surely we cannot approve a statutory technique the disingenuousness *305of which, as described by the majority, combines an apparent opportunity to speak with a real commitment to silence. The state has furnished a “soap box” fashioned of papier-mache.
Having correctly rejected the 25 percent rule, the district court erred in concluding that appellants were nevertheless properly precluded from the ballot by the three question rule. But, we cannot fairly apply the three question rule to these appellants, even assuming the rule is independently valid, because we cannot know at this juncture whether appellants could have obtained enough signatures to meet a reasonable minimum requirement in advance of the DuPage County Board meeting of July 20, 1982, at which time the last ballot slots were taken by the Board. Being thus ignorant, we should order the inclusion of appellants’ advisory question on the November 1982 ballot but allow the state to adopt for subsequent elections a signature requirement rationally related to the objective of preserving ballot order.
In any event, the three question limit is not independently valid. The three question rule, in conjunction with the first-come-first-served principle and the ease with which local governing boards can propose referenda, virtually invites local boards to preempt citizen-sponsored questions. The state cannot enforce a rule that has the effect of inviting undetectable and unreviewable censorship by units of government.
Though a state need not expand its electoral process to include citizen-sponsored binding or advisory questions, once having done so, it cannot attempt to avoid compliance with first amendment strictures. In particular, when a state chooses to sponsor a forum for the expression of ideas, it must take care to provide adequate procedural safeguards against unconstitutional censorship. For example, in Southeastern Promotions, Ltd. v. Conrad, 420 U.S. 546, 95 S.Ct. 1239, 43 L.Ed.2d 448 (1975), a theatrical production promoter sued the directors of a municipal theater who had refused to permit the staging of the musical “Hair.” The Court held that the directors’ power to grant access to the theater on the basis of their review of a play’s content enabled them to exercise a prior restraint of protected expression. The Court then held that the prior restraint was unconstitutional because it lacked necessary procedural safeguards. The Court stated, “the danger of censorship and of abridgment of our precious First Amendment freedoms is too great where officials have unbridled discretion over a forum’s use.” Id. at 553, 95 S.Ct. at 1244.
In this case, although the Board would not claim authority to preempt citizen petitions that it deems unsound, the procedures themselves clearly give the Board just such power. Moreover, there would be no way of knowing when this power was being exercised given the difficulty of determining the Board’s motives in, for example, putting forth eleven of its own ballot questions just in time to keep all citizens’ questions regarding tax reductions off the ballot, as it did in 1980. Access to a forum for the expression of political speech cannot be left unprotected from undetectable and unreviewable government censorship. Therefore, I would also reject the three question limit as it is presently enforced.7
For these reasons, I respectfully dissent.

. Ill.Rev.Stat. ch. 46 § 28-6.

. Ill.Rev.Stat. ch. 46 § 28-1.

. These petitions were submitted pursuant to Ill.Rev.Stat. ch. 120, § 643(a), which permits binding public questions concerning tax rates, to be printed on the ballot if submitted by citizen petitions bearing 1,000 or more signatures.

. In the analogous area of candidate access to the ballot, the Supreme Court has stressed the importance of realistically appraising the effect of ballot access rules: “the inevitable question for judgment [is]: in the context of [a state’s] politics, could a reasonably diligent indepen*304dent candidate be expected to satisfy the signature requirements, or will it be only rarely that the unaffiliated candidate will succeed in getting on the ballot?” Storer v. Brown, 415 U.S. 724, 742, 94 S.Ct. 1274, 1285, 39 L.Ed.2d 714 (1974).

. Ill.Rev.Stat. ch. 46 § 28-6.

. Cf. P. Bator, et al., Hart and Wechsler’s The Federal Courts And The Federal System 358 (2d ed. 1973) (“If Congress wants to frustrate the judicial check, our constitutional tradition requires that it be made to say so unmistakably, so that the people will understand and the political check can operate.”)

. Illinois could readily serve its interests in ballot order, citizen access, and governmental access by imposing, for example, a four question limit and allocating two questions to local governing bodies and two questions to citizens.