Inability to pay shouldn't stop candidate, appeals court rules

Friday, September 12, 2003

By David B. Caruso, The Associated Press

PHILADELPHIA -- Declaring that wealth shouldn't be a factor in whether a person can run for public office, a federal court ruled yesterday that Pennsylvania's practice of charging all candidates fees to get on the state ballot is unconstitutional.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court decision that two Green Party candidates, John Stith and Thomas Linzey, would have suffered a financial hardship if they had been compelled to pay fees to run in the 2000 election.

Stith said he had significant personal debt and only $50 in his campaign fund and couldn't afford the $100 fee to run for state representative. Linzey said he only made $4,611 in 2000 and couldn't afford the $200 fee to run for attorney general.

Writing for a three-judge panel, Judge Jane Roth said the state can charge fees, but only if it has some alternative method allowing poor candidates to qualify for the ballot.

"If a ballot access scheme, such as the one here, imposes a mandatory filing fee but fails to provide an alternative means of ballot access, such as signature collection, that scheme constitutes a severe burden on the rights of indigent candidates and their supporters," Roth said.

A spokesman for Attorney General Mike Fisher said the state's lawyers were disappointed with the decision and are considering whether to appeal.

The Pennsylvania Green Party and attorneys who represented Stith and Linzey praised the ruling as a victory for democracy.

"Any financial hurdle placed in the way of people who want to run for office, or support people for office, violates the equal protection provisions of the constitution," said attorney Jordan Yeager. "Money plays a big enough role in the electoral process as it is."

Bonnie Tenneriello of the National Voting Rights Institute, the plaintiffs' lead counsel, said most states changed their laws after U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the 1970s struck down such filing fees, saying they denied indigent candidates the right to run for office. Most states allowed candidates to either get waivers if they could not afford the fees or to gather voters' signatures in lieu of paying fees, she said.

Tenneriello said Pennsylvania tried arguing that its fees were low enough that they did not discriminate, but yesterday's ruling clarified that even low filing fees are a burden to the very poor.

"The law can't require a candidate to spend their last dollar," Tenneriello said.

The 3rd Circuit's opinion stopped short of barring the state from collecting the fee in the future. Instead, the judges limited their decision to the cases of Stith and Linzey, and said that unless the state rewrites its rules on filing fees, future disputes will probably have to be resolved in court as well.

It begged the state Legislature to avoid that by fixing a system it called "fundamentally flawed."

"Continued case-by-case litigation of the commonwealth's attempts to collect filing fees from indigent candidates will not serve the interests of the candidates, the commonwealth, or its voters," the court said. "The only way in which to conclusively resolve the problems that gave rise to this litigation is for the Legislature to amend the statutes at issue to comply with the Supreme Court's ballot access jurisprudence."

In their 2000 campaigns, Stith and Linzey were both allowed by the courts to run without paying the fees, but lost their races.

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