What Chief Judge Kozinski got (mostly) right in a presidential qualification case

This is the third in a series of posts about my forthcoming article, Scrutinizing Federal Electoral Qualifications, 90 Indiana Law Journal (forthcoming), available on SSRN. Comments, critiques, and feedback are welcome.

After identifying the problem of evaluating federal qualifications and examining Congress's role in the process, what's left for states to do? Enter the case of Peta Lindsay.

In 2012, she was 27 years old. She sought the nomination from the Peace and Freedom Party to run for president. California discovered that she was not eligible and excluded her from the ballot. The Ninth Circuit, in an opinion by Chief Judge Kozinski, found today that she could be excluded from the ballot. (The PDF of the opinion is here.)

The opinion is mostly right in this regard: assuming the power for a state to exclude a candidate from the ballot exists, what standard applies to reviewing that power? The First Amendment doesn't really guarantee you a slot on the ballot if you're not eligible; the Equal Protection Clause can't really help if there's a meaningful basis to distinguish between eligible and ineligible candidates, which the Constitution clearly anticipates; and the Twentieth Amendment does not demand that the Constitution vests exclusive authority to resolve presidential disputes (alluded to earlier here).

But, that all makes two important assumptions: the state does have the power to exclude a candidate from the ballot, and it has done so in this case.

As to the first, the question is more direct. The state legislature may "direct" the "manner" of appointment of electors. It may certainly decide to restrict the appointment of electors to only "eligible" candidates, and it may channel that decision-making process accordingly. The power given to Congress is not absolute (which, the Ninth Circuit emphasized, is emphatically the case with the Twentieth Amendment claim). In fact, as the selection of presidential electors is reserved to state legislatures, there is an even greater case that the power remains in the states.

As to the second, the question is more complicated. What state statute authorizes the Secretary of State to make inquiries into the eligibility of candidates? The closest statute the California Secretary of State cited was California Government Code § 12172.5, which provides,

(a) . . . The Secretary of State shall see that elections are efficiently conducted and that state election laws are enforced. The Secretary of State may require elections officers to make reports concerning elections in their jurisdictions.

...

(d) The Secretary of State may adopt regulations to assure the uniform application and administration of state election laws.

That's hardly the stuff of a directive from the state legislature to the elections officer to evaluate a candidate's qualifications.

That's not to say that it's unprecedented: in Cleaver v. Jordan, a 1968 dispute (discussed in a 2010 dispute, Keyes v. Bowen), California courts allowed the Secretary of State to exclude a thirty-three-year-old presidential candidate from the ballot.

But it is to say that courts--particularly federal courts--should be careful in treading upon the state legislature's directives to its executive officers as to how to conduct presidential elections. There was some discussion about the interpretation of the state statute at oral argument, but that all disappeared in the Ninth Circuit's opinion.

The only suggestion otherwise took place on reference to California Election Code § 6720, which says that a candidate "shall" be placed when she is one advocated for office under the Peace and Freedom Party. The court flatly rejects any exercise of supplemental jurisdiction over this issue, noting, "it has no bearing on this lawsuit, which is based entirely on federal law."

And perhaps that is the right outcome, to a point. States are left with administering the presidential ballot; it is left to state courts to wrestle with the interpretations of state laws. But even then, a court must still assume that the state is vested with the power to exclude; it is no answer to point to another provision that might compel a place on the ballot and kick that issue back to a state.

It is on this, then, that the Ninth Circuit got the Peta Lindsay dispute (mostly) right. But this assumption of the power of states to evaluate the qualifications presidential candidates remains, again, unaddressed, and merely assumed, in a judicial opinion--and it's an assumption my latest Article seeks to highlight.