Judge’s ruling could mean good news for smaller NC political parties

As most of North Carolina prepared for winter weather late last month, a federal judge issued a ruling that could have a lasting impact on state politics.

US District Judge Terrence Boyle’s 10-page order arrived on Jan. 23, while Gov. Josh Stein and his emergency management team warned North Carolinians to stock up on food and supplies. State officials urged people to stay off North Carolina roads for days.

It’s no surprise that Boyle’s ruling attracted little immediate attention during those circumstances. Yet the judge’s words deserve scrutiny.

Boyle determined that the State Board of Elections, led by Democrats at the time, violated the US Constitution when rejecting ballot access for the Justice For All Party in 2024.

The January ruling did not alter any electoral outcome.

An August 2024 injunction from Boyle had allowed JFA to secure a ballot spot for the general election. The party’s presidential candidate, academic and activist Cornel West, secured 12,099 votes, 0.2% of the state total.

JFA would have needed 10 times as many votes to retain ballot access under state law. Instead the state elections board dropped the party in June and registered its members as unaffiliated.

Yet Boyle’s latest ruling could affect future ballot access disputes in North Carolina.

The state elections board, with a 3-2 Democratic majority, had based its rejection of JFA on concerns about petition signatures the party had collected to secure ballot access. An interest group linked to Democratic operative Marc Elias supported election officials. Meanwhile, Republican groups supported JFA.

The board’s application of North Carolina’s ballot-access law needed to be “narrowly tailored” to avoid violating voters’ and candidates’ constitutional rights.

“Narrow tailoring requires a scalpel; the Board used a blunt instrument,” Boyle wrote in August 2024. “The Board effectively disenfranchised over 17,000 North Carolina voters who signed petitions to certify JFA as a new political party on flawed, highly suspect grounds.”

Seventeen months later, Boyle’s assessment remained the same.

Before addressing the substance of JFA’s challenge, he rejected the elections board’s argument that the case was moot. The 2024 election took place “before this case matured,” he wrote. Plus the JFA dispute “is a repetition of the unconstitutional conduct” the Democrat-led elections board had displayed in 2022. During that election cycle, the board attempted to block the left-of-center Green Party from North Carolina’s ballot.

The JFA case qualifies for a “mootness exception.” The court can consider “wrongs capable of repetition but evading review,” Boyle explained.

Once the judge determined that he was dealing with a “live” case, he consulted federal precedents from 1983 and 1992 that help determine the “constitutionality of a ballot-access law.”

“The first step under the Anderson-Burdick framework is to decide if the law … imposes a severe burden on First Amendment rights,” Boyle explained on Jan. 23. “If it does, it is subject to strict scrutiny and can be upheld only if narrowly drawn to support a compelling state interest. At the second step, the Court must weigh the severe burden on plaintiffs’ rights against the state interest which purports to justify the challenged rule or its application.”

In this dispute, the elections board “imposed a severe burden on plaintiffs’ rights,” Boyle determined. The law “was not narrowly tailored to protect the claimed government interests.”

“Accordingly, plaintiffs are entitled to a judgment declaring that the Board of Elections’ application of the political party statutes and failure to certify JFA as a political party was unconstitutional,” Boyle concluded.

JFA did not secure a complete victory. Boyle rejected the party’s request to keep the case active with a challenge to new ballot access rules.

“[W]hile the parties rely on the Board’s past conduct to evidence its likelihood of wrongfully denying political party certification in the future, the Board’s past conduct is not so telling,” the judge explained.

Boyle noted that Republicans had taken control of the state elections board last year, long after JFA’s ballot access dispute. “Any speculation as to what the Board will do, … is just that — speculation,” the judge wrote.

The challenged rules “are subject to the Board’s uncertain application — the new Board could rescind the rules, for all the parties know — and there is no imminent threat” to JFA, Boyle added. JFA’s complaint is thus “unripe.”

While Boyle was unwilling to engage in “speculation” about future ballot access decisions in North Carolina, his ruling for JFA offered a warning. Federal courts will employ the strictest form of scrutiny when restrictions targeting smaller political parties place “severe burdens” on constitutional rights.

Mitch Kokai is senior political analyst for the John Locke Foundation.