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Minnesota Can Restrict Candidates To One Party

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WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, April 28) -- In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court upheld a Minnesota law barring candidates from representing more than one party on state ballots.

It was a case that pitted states' rights against freedom-of-association arguments.

"States certainly have an interest in protecting the integrity, fairness and efficiency of their ballots and election processes," Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote for the majority. He was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Sandra Day O'Connor and Stephen G. Breyer.

Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote for the minority, said the ruling "demeans the strength of the two-party system to assume that the major parties need to rely on laws that discriminate against independent voters and minor parties in order to preserve their positions of power." Stevens was joined by Justices David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Though some 40 states bar multiple-party candidacies, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Utah all allow it, and today's decision will not affect them. Minnesota's ban was challenged in 1994 by the Twin Cities Area New Party, which sought to run a candidate already listed by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

In comments to The Associated Press, the New Party's national chairman, Joe Rogers, accused the Supreme Court of making "a political decision, not a constitutional decision. It showed it was more devoted to maintaining the two-party stranglehold than opening up the political system."

Minnesota's lawyers defended the ban as necessary to prevent candidates from exploiting the state's ballot-access law to create phony parties in an effort to appear on the ballot more than once.


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