Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 14, 2018 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Decided
- June 14, 2018
- Term
- October Term 2017
- Vote
- 7–2
- Majority author
- Justice Roberts
- Issue area
- First Amendment
- Disposition
- Reversed and remanded
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
- Constitutional ruling
- State/territorial law held unconstitutional
Opinion excerpt
Chief Justice ROBERTS delivered the opinion of the Court. Under Minnesota law, voters may not wear a political badge, political button, or anything bearing political insignia inside a polling place on Election Day. The question presented is whether this ban violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. I A Today, Americans going to their polling places on Election Day expect to wait in a line, briefly interact with an election official, enter a private voting booth, and cast an anonymous ballot. Little about this ritual would have been familiar to a voter in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. For one thing, voters typically deposited privately prepared ballots at the polls instead of completing official ballots on-site. These pre-made ballots often took the form of "party tickets"-printed slates of candidate selections, often distinctive in appearance, that political parties distributed to their supporters and pressed upon others around the polls. See E. Evans, A History of the Australian Ballot System in the United States 6-11 (1917) (Evans); R. Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century 14-15 (2004) (Bensel). The physical arrangement confronting the voter was also different. The polling place often consisted simply of a "voting window" through which the voter would hand his ballot to an election official situated in a separate room with the…
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