Dear Friends,

Since our founding, the National Voting Rights Institute has challenged the myth that economic discrimination in the political process is consistent with the United States Constitution and with the basic ideals of our democracy. As we have often emphasized, the United States Supreme Court invalidated such discrimination when it struck down the poll tax barrier in the Court’s landmark 1966 ruling, Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections.

Six years after that ruling, the Court reiterated this principle when it struck down mandatory candidate filing fees. "We would ignore reality," the Court stated in its 1972 Bullock v. Carter ruling, "were we not to find that this system falls with unequal weight on voters, as well as candidates, according to their economic status."

In 2000, in the midst of our ongoing work to bring down the newest wealth barrier to equal participation in the political process – today’s campaign finance system – a relic of the past came to our attention. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, it turned out, had for years been imposing a mandatory candidate filing fee requirement on candidates running for state legislative or statewide office, notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s 30-year-old precedent finding such a fee requirement to be unconstitutional.

NVRI subsequently brought suit in federal court in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on behalf of candidates who could not afford to pay the fee. We sought to have the fee system struck down as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause to the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and to reaffirm the constitutional principle that wealth barriers have no place in our elections.

In our cover story for this newsletter, we are proud to report on our victory in that case. In its unanimous ruling this September invalidating Pennsylvania’s mandatory candidate filing fee system, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit stated:

"[T]he primary issue in this case is the absence of a reasonable alternative means of ballot access. By failing to provide such an alternative, the Commonwealth has made economic status a decisive factor in determining ballot access. It therefore has run afoul of the Supreme Court’s ballot access jurisprudence."

As we celebrate this victory, we will continue to press forward with our work across the country challenging the current campaign finance system as a barrier to our democracy which, like the poll tax and candidate filing fee systems, cannot stand the test of time. We are pleased to report on our progress with that work in these pages, and, as always, we look forward to keeping you updated on key developments.

Thank you for all of your continued critical support.

Sincerely,

John C. Bonifaz

National Voting Rights Institute, 27 School Street, Suite 500, Boston, MA 02108
Phone: (617) 624-3900  ¤  Fax: (617) 624-3911  ¤  www.nvri.org  ¤  nvri@nvri.org