Court Opinion

ID: 9425214
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:14:04.457786+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:54.045401
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Marshall,
with whom Mr. Justice Douglas and Mr. Justice Brennan concur,
dissenting.
For the same reasons that I gave in Marston v. Lewis, ante, p. 682,1 dissent from the affirmance of the judgment of the District Court. Unlike Arizona, Georgia does not use volunteer deputy registrars, a system that the Court in Marston thought created special problems warranting special treatment. Indeed, the State’s expert witness in this case testified that there was something dangerous about using deputy registrars. Nor does Georgia have as late a primary as Arizona. As in Marston, appellees here did not show that it was impossible to increase the size of the registrars’ staffs or the efficiency of their operations. Moreover, there was evidence that final lists of registered voters are not prepared until 14 days before the election, which indicates that there is no serious administrative impediment to keeping registration open for a relatively long period.
The Court also relies on an ingenious bootstrap argument that I cannot let pass without comment. The statutes in question in Marston were enacted last year after our decision in Dunn v. Blumstein, 405 U. S. 330 (1972). The Arizona Legislature therefore knew that its limitations on registration could only be justified by the administrative burdens faced by registrars. It knew that insuring the purity of the ballot box and guaranteeing the knowledgeability of voters were not goals that could be permissibly served by time limitations on registration. Id., at 353-357. The Court in Marston thus correctly noted that the Arizona statutes reflected a recent judg*689ment that 50 days were necessary to avoid administrative problems.
In this case, the Court quotes that statement from Marston. The difficulty is that the Georgia statutes here were adopted nearly a decade ago. The legislative judgment is hardly a recent one. Nor was it made knowing that only administrative difficulties were a justification for durational residency requirements. Even if we would be inclined to defer to a recent and informed legislative determination of necessity, when there is no reason to believe that the legislature made such a determination, deference in that regard is uncalled for.
Finally, I believe it important to indicate my view that the decisions today provide no basis for making it more difficult to register by making shorter any existing registration periods, in the absence of compelling evidence of extraordinary new circumstances. If 30 days were all that some state officials needed yesterday, that is all they need today.