Court Opinion

ID: 9425507
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:14:55.416987+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:56.009761
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Blackmun,
with whom Mr. Justice Rehnquist joins, dissenting.
Once again, we are confronted with a claim, fashionable of late, that a state statute which, because of its positive provisions, Rosario v. Rockefeller, 410 U. S. 752 (1973); Kusper v. Pontikes, ante, p. 51; see Goosby v. Osser, 409 U. S. 512 (1973), or because of its failure to provide particular persons particular relief, as here, is an unconstitutional deprivation of the right to vote. And once again the Court strikes down the state statutes.
Because I think the Court is unnecessarily and unwisely elevating and projecting constitutional pronouncement into an area — and into distant and obscure corners of that area — that, for me, should be a domain reserved for the State’s own housekeeping, I dissent.
I join, and with some emphasis, the Court’s observations and those of Mr. Justice Marshall in his concurring opinion, to the effect that the much-amended New York statutes here under challenge cut unevenly. Surely, no one would claim that they are now a model of the draftsman’s art. The absentee-voting privilege appears to be available for the voter who is an inmate of a veterans’ bureau hospital, N. Y. Election Law § 117 (1964), but not, seemingly, due to the statute’s silence (unless he can otherwise qualify “because of illness or physical disability,” id., § 117-a), for the voter who is just as nonambulatory, and just as confined, in some municipal or denominational institution. It is available, under § 117, for the voter, “unavoidably absent” on business, and even for the voter “absent” on vacation, but not, seemingly, for the voter who is absent attending a wedding or visiting a seriously *536ill relative in the next State. And it is concededly available for the occupant of the county jail who resides in another New York county but not for the occupant who resides in the local county.
These are irritating and less-than-thoughtful sub silentio distinctions, and the temptation to eliminate them by striking down the statutes is strong and appealing. I am not convinced, however, that we should be so ready to interfere. New York’s present statutory structure has developed by successive remedial amendments, each designed to correct a then-apparent gap. The State, after all, as a matter of constitutional requirement, need not have provided for any absentee registration or absentee voting. And .
“a legislature traditionally has been allowed to take reform ‘one step at a time, addressing itself to the phase of the problem which seems most acute to the legislative mind,’ Williamson v. Lee Optical of Oklahoma, Inc., 348 U. S. 483, 489 (1955); and a legislature need not run the risk of losing an entire remedial scheme simply because it failed, through inadvertence or otherwise, to cover every evil that might conceivably have been attacked. . . .” McDonald v. Board of Election Comm’rs, 394 U. S. 802, 809 (1969).
See also Jefferson v. Hackney, 406 U. S. 535, 546 (1972).
Furthermore, this fallout from the New York statutes is minor and collateral and not of great, let alone constitutional, import. There is bound to be a dividing line somewhere, intended or unintended (as I suspect this was). If that dividing line operates to deprive a person of what he feels is his right to vote, his reaction will be critical. Whether he has a constitutional claim, however, is something else again. Line drawing is necessary, as the Court conceded in Dunn v. Blumstein, 405 U. S. *537330, 348 (1972), and by the very process of line drawing, someone will be left out or treated differently.
I feel, therefore, that any unequal effect of the New York statutes is largely incidental and wholly a function of the State’s failure to extend its remedial provisions a little further. These appellants are affected, to be sure, but they are affected because it was their misfortune to be detainees or convicted misdemeanants serving their sentences in the county jail on the critical day. The misdemeanants were in jail through their own doing, just as the petitioners in Rosario v. Rockefeller, supra, found themselves unable to vote because of their failure to meet an enrollment deadline. The plight of detainees elicits concern, of course, for a detainee may not be guilty of the offense with which he is charged. Yet the statutes’ effect upon him, although unfortunate, produces a situation no more critical than the situation of the voter, just as unfortunate, who on election day is away attending the funeral of a loved one in a distant State. These are inequalities, but they are the incidental inequalities of life, and I do not regard them as unconstitutional.
I would refrain from continued tampering and interference with the details of state election laws. If details are deserving of cure, the State’s legislature, not this Court, ought to be the curative agent.