On June 18, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an opinion in Reed v Town of Gilbert Arizona, 13-502. The decision is unanimous as to the result. The decision strikes down a town ordinance that says the purpose of the sign should determine how long it can remain standing, and what size it can be. Six justices said that if a government discriminates against signs based on their purpose, that restriction can only be justified by a compelling reason. This case concerns signs placed on private property.
The ordinance struck down says signs expressing an ideological message may remain up for an unlimited amount of time, and be up to 20 square feet. But signs directing the public to an event could not be placed until 12 hours before the event was to start, and had to be removed within two hours after the event was over, and could be no larger than six square feet. The case had been filed by a church that doesn’t have its own building, and therefore has to move around from building to building every week. Therefore, the church depends on signs telling passers-by where the church meeting will be. The church had been fined for putting up such signs earlier than the town’s restrictions allowed.
The key sentence in the decision is “Thus, a speech regulation targeted at specific subject matter is content based even if it does not discriminate among viewpoints within that subject matter.”
Logically, the principles set forth in this decision ought to apply to restrictions on write-in voting. States that ban write-in voting are, in effect, saying that the content of a voter’s vote determines whether it can be expressed. A vote in a public election is an expression of the voter’s views. States that ban write-ins are letting some views be expressed, and not letting other views be expressed.
The decision may also help the Libertarian and Green Parties to win their pending lawsuit against Arizona voter registration forms, which make it more difficult for voters to register into those parties (even though they are ballot-qualified) than into the Republican and Democratic Parties. The decision may also be useful for lawsuits filed against ballot formats that make it more difficult for voters to vote for independent candidates than for Republican and Democratic nominees.
Not that I would agree, but I think I can foresee the argument that would be used. On a ballot, the state is giving the voter options from which to choose. That is very different from a private entity using space that it pays for to promote something the entity wishes to express.
The key question isn’t who pays for the venue for speech, but whether it is private speech or government speech. For example, today the US Supreme Court said in a Texas case that license plates are government speech, not the speech of the vehicle’s owner. But no one would ever argue that a vote, or a choice of which party to join, is government speech. Even though government forms are being used, the speech is the individual voter speaking.
The robot hack MORONS invented the *strict* stuff and the *compelling* stuff (i.e. more VAGUE adjectives) many decades ago to add even more confusion in all sorts of legal subjects.
LAW 101 – An act or omission does or does NOT violate the LAW.
Much too difficult for the SCOTUS MORON HACKS to understand.
From the Court’s decision on license plates:
“A person who displays a message on a Texas license plate likely intends to convey to the public that the State has endorsed that message,” Breyer wrote. “If not the individual could simply display that message in question in larger letters on a bumper sticker right next to the plate. But the individual prefers a license plate design to the purely private speech expressed through bumper stickers. That may well be because Texas’s license plate designs convey government agreement with the message displayed.”
Has the Court unwittingly set a precedent that could easily be applied to the controversial holiday religious displays on public property, prayer in school and prayer as a part of governmental proceedings. Do they not represent attempts to convey to the public that the government endorses those messages?
Even the dissent in ‘Burdick v Takushi’ agreed the purpose of a government ballot was not for generalized free speech.