Communist Party of Illinois v. State Bd. of Elections for State of Ill.

• Decision Date: 27 June 1975
• Docket Number: No. 74-1950,74-1950
• Citation: 518 F.2d 517
• Parties: COMMUNIST PARTY OF ILLINOIS et al., Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. STATE BOARD OF ELECTIONS FOR the STATE OF ILLINOIS et al., Defendants-Appellants.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 517

518 F.2d 517

COMMUNIST PARTY OF ILLINOIS et al., Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. STATE BOARD OF ELECTIONS FOR the STATE OF ILLINOIS et al Defendants-Appellants.

No. 74-1950.

United States Court of Appeals Seventh Circuit.

Argued April 23, 1975.

Decided June 27, 1975.

William J. Scott, Atty. Gen., Herbert L. Caplan, Asst. Atty. Gen., Chicago, Ill., for defendants-appellants.

Howard Eglit, Chicago, Ill., for plaintiffs-appellees.

Before SWYGERT and TONE, Circuit Judges, and GRANT, Senior District Judge. ^*

SWYGERT, Circuit Judge.

Plaintiffs, the Communist Party of Illinois, several of its candidates for state office in the November 5, 1974 general election, and a registered voter desiring to vote for these candidates, filed suit for declaratory and injunctive relief against the State Board of Election Commissioners for the State of Illinois ¹ seeking to challenge the constitutionality of a section of the Illinois Election Code, Ill.Rev.Stat. ch. 46, § 10-2. This statute requires any political party seeking statewide ballot recognition to submit petitions containing not less than 25,000 signatures of qualified voters, not more than 13,000 of which may be counted from any one county. ² Plaintiffs sought an order declaring the requirement limiting the number of signatories from any one county void as being unconstitutional, and injunctive relief requiring the defendants to certify plaintiff candidates so that they would be listed on the statewide ballot for the November, 1974 general election.

Initially, the district court entered an order declaring section 10-2 unconstitutional and denying defendants' motion to convene a three-judge court pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2281. ³ The court found section 10-2 violative of the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment in that it "discriminates against voters of the most populous county of the state in favor of voters in the less populous counties." The court found the claim that the section is not unconstitutional to be "wholly without merit in light of a prior decision by a three-judge panel of this court declaring this same statutory provision unconstitutional in Communist Party v. Ogilvie, (357 F.Supp. 105 (N.D.Ill.1972)), and other decisions declaring similar signature distribution requirements unconstitutional." ⁴ In response to this order, plaintiffs moved for injunctive relief. In a second order, the district court entered a preliminary injunction ⁵ directing defendants to certify or cause to be certified plaintiff candidates for the November, 1974 election "if the only grounds for non-certification is failure to comply with the county distribution signature requirement."

Defendants appeal from both of these orders. ⁶ They contend that the issue of the constitutionality of section 10-2 has not been rendered "wholly without merit" by previous decisions, and that the district judge was therefore required by 28 U.S.C. § 2281 to convene a three-judge court in order to enjoin the enforcement of this state statute. They further contend that section 10-2 represents a non-arbitrary attempt by the State of Illinois to assure that residents throughout Illinois have "equal opportunity to be involved in statewide political party activities," and to assure that "multifarious political associations with little or no popular support do not bemuse the electoral process." They say section 10-2 does not, therefore, offend the Fourteenth Amendment.

I

In our view, the issue of whether the district court in this case should have convened a three-judge court prior to issuing the preliminary injunctive order directing the Board not to enforce section 10-2 against these plaintiffs in the November, 1974 general election is moot. That election is over; plaintiffs and defendants here have little stake in litigating the technical question of whether the relief obtained in connection with that election had a proper jurisdictional base. Plaintiff candidates were in fact certified and listed on the November ballot. The past cannot be retraced. A decision on the section 2281 question would be purely advisory at this point and would not affect the rights of these litigants insofar as the injunctive order is concerned. ⁷ See Oil Workers Unions v. Missouri, 361 U.S. 363, 366-68, 80 S.Ct. 391, 4 L.Ed.2d 373 (1960); North Carolina v. Rice,404 U.S. 244, 245-46, 92 S.Ct. 402, 30 L.Ed.2d 413 (1971).

II

The heart of this case is the district court's order declaring section 10-2 unconstitutional. This determination was based on the reasoning contained in a previous decision of a three-judge district court in this circuit declaring section 10-2 unconstitutional as violative of the equal protection provision of the Fourteenth Amendment, Communist Party v. Ogilvie, supra, and on the rationale of the Supreme Court's decision in Moore v. Ogilvie, 394 U.S. 814, 89 S.Ct. 1493, 23 L.Ed.2d 1 (1969) holding a predecessor of section 10-2 unconstitutional on the same ground. We believe this determination was correct.

In Moore the Supreme Court had before it a statutory provision requiring certain independent candidates, in order to be certified for the statewide ballot in Illinois, to obtain the signatures of 25,000 qualified voters, including signatures of two hundred voters from each of at least fifty of the one hundred and two Illinois counties. This provision had been specifically upheld in a previous decision of the Supreme Court in MacDougall v. Green, 335 U.S. 281, 69 S.Ct. 1, 93 L.Ed. 3 (1948). Expressly overruling MacDougall as being "out of line with our recent apportionment cases," the Court in Moore framed the equal protection problem in these terms:

It is no answer to the argument under the Equal Protection Clause that this law was designed to require statewide support for launching a new political party rather than support from a few localities. This law applies a rigid, arbitrary formula to sparsely settled counties and populous counties alike, contrary to the constitutional theme of equality among citizens in the exercise of their political rights. The idea that one group can be granted greater voting strength than another is hostile to the one man, one vote basis of our representative government.

Under this Illinois law the electorate in 49 of the counties which contain 93.4% of the registered voters may not form a new political party and place its candidates on the ballot. Yet 25,000 of the remaining 6.6% of registered voters properly distributed among the 53 remaining counties may form a new party to elect candidates to office. This law thus discriminates against the residents of the populous counties of the State in favor of rural sections. It, therefore, lacks the equality to which the exercise of political rights is entitled under the Fourteenth Amendment. 394 U.S. at 818-19, 89 S.Ct. at 1495-1496.

Section 10-2 suffers the same constitutional defect. To paraphrase the Supreme Court in Moore: Under section 10-2 the entire electorate of Cook County, which represents 45% of all registered voters in Illinois, may not form a new political party and place its candidates on the ballot. Yet any 25,000 of the remaining 55% of registered voters properly distributed among the remaining 101 counties may form a new party to elect candidates to office. Put another way, the approximately 2,750,000 registered Illinois voters in urbanized Cook County do not have the power under section 10-2 to create a statewide political party to protect their own peculiar interests, while 25,000 voters in any two or more counties in rural downstate Illinois may create such a party to protect their distinctly different, and often competing interests. This two-county requirement, like the fifty county requirement in Moore, "discriminates against the residents of the populous counties of the state in favor of rural sections." ⁸

Given the fact that section 10-2 directly affects the fundamental right of a class of persons to "vote effectively" Williams v. Rhodes, 393 U.S. 23, 30-34, 89 S.Ct. 5, 21 L.Ed.2d 24 (1968), ⁹ the statute cannot stand unless it is necessary to advance a compelling state interest. Id. at 31, 89 S.Ct. 5. If other means exist which will adequately protect the state interest involved, but which will be less intrusive on the right to vote or less discriminatory in effect, such other means must be employed and section 10-2 must be struck down. See Dunn v. Blumstein, 405 U.S. 330, 334-43, 92 S.Ct. 995, 31 L.Ed.2d 274 (1972).

In their brief, defendants contend that the county distribution requirement is necessary to prevent numerous parties with negligible popular support from overcrowding the ballot and thereby confusing and demeaning the statewide electoral process. In order to achieve this goal, defendants urge, with considerable candor, that the strength of the concentrated "Chicago" (Cook County) vote must be diluted:

Politics is access to voters. The solicitation of nominating signatures and distribution of campaign literature are facilitated where the population is concentrated. A single high-rise apartment building in Chicago may contain more people than a county town, and several city blocks may contain more people than entire "downstate" counties. A Chicago precinct captain can personally contact more voters in an hour than his downstate counterpart may be able to reach in days of effort.

Thus, a Chicago based, would-be new political party approaches any statewide election with an advantage that simply does not exist elsewhere in the State, and petition efforts, otherwise equal, produce greater results in "Chicago."

Consequently, minority parties from "Chicago" ab initio enjoy greater access to the ballot, and it is the vote effectiveness of downstate voters which is diluted by the demographic realities. Without some regulation, Chicago fringe candidates would easily flood the ballot.

Balancing this inequality is the object of the signature distribution...