Former Justice John Paul Stevens died July 16 at the age of 99. While he was on the U.S. Supreme Court, he was a strong defender of voting rights for people who wish to vote for candidates other than Democratic and Republican candidates. He was especially eager to preserve the ability of independent candidates, and new parties, to get on the ballot even if they didn’t enter the race early in the election year.
He was President Gerald Ford’s only appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1977, in Mandel v Bradley, a case over the March petition deadline in Maryland, he wrote separately to say that no previous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld early petition deadlines. He specifically said that Jenness v Fortson, the 1971 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld Georgia’s 5% petition requirement, did not stand for the idea that a June petition deadline was constitutional. Georgia had a June petition deadline when Jenness v Fortson was decided, but Stevens pointed out that the Socialist Workers Party, which brought Jenness v Fortson, had not complained about the June deadline, and therefore the deadline issue was not settled in that case.
In 1983 Stevens wrote Anderson v Celebrezze, which struck down the Ohio independent presidential petition deadline of March 20. This case had been brought by Congressman John B. Anderson, who became an independent presidential candidate on April 24, 1980, after having lost 20 Republican presidential primaries. Anderson sued all five states in which he had missed the petition deadline, and won all five lawsuits, and the Ohio case was then reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court. It was tough for Anderson to win this case, because a previous U.S. Supreme Court precedent on early deadlines, Mandel v Bradley, had said early petition deadlines were only unconstitutional if the number of signatures was high. Ohio in 1980, and currently, only required 5,000 signatures for an independent presidential candidate. Five other presidential candidates in 1980 had complied with the Ohio petition. At the time, 5,000 signatures was only one-tenth of 1% of the number of registered voters in Ohio. But, Stevens skillfully wrote an opinion which established that early petition deadlines are unconstitutional all by themselves, regardless of the number of signatures. Anderson v Celebrezze has been responsible for lower court ballot access victories on over half the states. Many are pending currently.
Stevens and Justice Byron White did not like each other. White wrote all of the unfavorable ballot access decisions from 1972 through 1992. Stevens and White were always on the opposite side in these cases. White voted to keep even the strongest independent presidential candidates off ballots, including George Wallace in 1968, Eugene McCarthy in 1976, and John Anderson in 1980. Thanks to Political Wire for the news about the death of Stevens.