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.