What has become of me? I find myself reading 60+ page legal decisions for fun...
Yesterday the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a decision which would appear to delay the California recall election, ostensibly until March. The decision read as synposis of everything I've learned in the first few weeks of my civil procedure class, plus a few things that we'll cover eventually.
In the first few weeks of the semester our professor had us read cases like Goldberg v. Kelly and Mathews v. Eldridge to get a feel for how the courts work: what kinds of cases go to federal court? What legal claims get addressed? How do the courts balance various interests?
In the California election case the plaintiffs (the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, the NAACP, et. al.) sued the Secretary of State of California for scheduling the recall election on October 7. The crux of their complaint stemmed from the fact that polling places in some of the most populous counties used antiquated and now discredited punchcard voting technology (the technology that introduced the word "chad" into everyone's vocabulary in 2000). This technology is so suspect that votes cast this way are several times more likely to not be counted at all or to be counted incorrectly. In fact, the Secretary of State has decertified the technology, disallowing its use in future elections. However, not forseeing the need for an October 7 election, the Secretary of State had established a March 2004 deadline for upgrading the voting technology. Some counties have finished upgrading, but some have not. This dichotomy, the court reasoned, would mean that the votes of certain counties would be subject to different counting methodology, which the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000's infamous Bush v. Gore determined violated citizens' right to equal protection (all votes should be counted by the same means lest some be given greater weight than others). The variances caused by some voters having to use the more unreliable technology could in effect potentially disenfranchise thousands of voters including, it noted, the sitting governor himself who lives in one of the counties with the suspect voting technology.
However, as we learned from Goldberg and Mathews, the mere existence of a violation of a legal right such as equal protection does not automatically require a direct remedy to reverse the situation. The court wouldn't simply order a new date for the election with no thought to the cost, the benefit, and any other compelling interests. In fact, the court's opinion included a substantial analysis on the relative merits of delaying the election. In doing so it noted that a typical reservation about delaying an election, in that it might jeopardize the workings of government or leave important seats vacant, didn't apply here because the governorship is currently occupied, and not for longer than would have been otherwise legally proscribed.
The court also made an important distinction about the balancing of the public interest by separating it from state interest. The lower court had presumed the public interest to be represented by the state's interest, in this case expressed by the Secretary of State's desire to follow explicitly California election law requiring the election to be held on October 7. However, the appeals court noted that it's the spirit of the election law, not necessarily the letter, that should be considered. To simply defer to the strict rules of election law in the face of such infringement on the rights of the people (the voters) would be to subjugate the public's interest to state interest, something that the 14th Amendment tries to prevent.
Posted 9/20, mostly written earlier.