On March 16, U.S. District Court Judge William J. Haynes refused to stay his own ruling in the Tennessee ballot access case, Green Party of Tennessee v Hargett, 3:11-0692. The original decision in this case, handed down on February 3, 2012, struck down the state’s ballot access law for newly-qualifying parties. It also ruled that a 2011 law, providing that the two major parties should always have the top two spots on the ballot, is unconstitutional. Finally, it ordered the state to recognize the two plaintiff political parties, the Green Party and the Constitution Party.

The state had then asked Judge Haynes to stay his own opinion. Specifically the state asked him to stay the part of the decision on the order of political parties on the ballot, and the part of the decision that put the two plaintiff parties on the ballot.

The March 16 Memorandum from the Court rebuts the state’s argument on ballot order. The state, in its request for a stay, had asserted that Tennessee has party column ballots, and that the social science research on the effect of ballot order cited in the original February 3, 2012 decision only relates to office-group ballots. Judge Haynes went to the trouble of finding examples of recent Tennessee ballots. The ballots he found, and which he attached to his opinion, prove that in some populous counties in Tennessee, an office-group ballot is used.

An “office-group ballot” lists each office up for election, and then underneath that particular office heading, lists all the candidates running for that office. By contrast, a “party-column” ballot divides the ballot into rectangular boxes, with all of one particular party’s nominees in one column (or, in one row, depending on the layout).

The Tennessee vocabulary for these ballot types does not use the common vocabulary. In Tennessee law, an office-group ballot is called a block-ballot, and a party-column ballot is called a “party block ballot.” The decision uses the Tennessee terms, not the standard terms.