Ray v. Blair/Dissent Jackson

by Robert H. Jackson

United States Supreme Court

343 U.S. 214

Ray  v.  Blair

 Argued: March 31, 1952. --- Decided: April 15, 1952

Mr. Justice JACKSON, with whom Mr. Justice DOUGLAS joins, dissenting.

The Constitution and its Twelfth Amendment allow each State, in its own way, to name electors with such personal qualifications, apart from stated disqualifications, as the State prescribes. Their number, the time that they shall be named, the manner in which the State must certify their ascertainment and the determination of any contest are prescribed by federal law. U.S.Const., Art. II, § 1, 3 U.S.C. §§ 1-7, 3 U.S.C.A. §§ 1-7. When chosen, they perform a federal function of balloting for President and Vice President, federal law prescribing the time of meeting, the manner of certifying 'all the votes given by them,' and in detail how such certificates shall be transmitted and counted. U.S.Const., Amend. XII, 3 U.S.C. §§ 9-20, 3 U.S.C.A. §§ 9-20. But federal statute undertakes no control of their votes beyond providing 'The electors shall vote for President and Vice President, respectively, in the manner directed by the Constitution', 3 U.S.C. § 8, 3 U.S.C.A. § 8, and the Constitution requires only that they 'vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves'. U.S.Const., Amend. XII. No one faithful to our history can deny that the plan originally contemplated, what is implicit in its text, that electors would be free agents, to exercise an independent and nonpartisan judgment as to the men best qualified for the Nation's highest offices. Certainly under that plan no state law could control the elector in performance of his federal duty, any more than it could a United States Senator who also is chosen by, and represents, the State.

This arrangement miscarried. Electors, although often personally eminent, independent, and respectable, officially became voluntary party lackeys and intellectual nonentities to whose memory we might justly paraphrase a tuneful satire:

They always voted at their Party's call And never thought of thinking for themselves at all.

As an institution the Electoral College suffered atrophy almost indistinguishable from rigor mortis.

However, in 1948, Alabama's Democratic Party Electors refused to vote for the nominee of the Democratic National Convention. To put an end to such party unreliability the party organization, exercising state-delegated authority, closed the official primary to any candidate for elector unless he would pledge himself, under oath, to support any candidate named by the Democratic National Convention. It is conceded that under long-prevailing conditions this effectively forecloses any chance of the State being represented by an unpledged elector. In effect, before one can become an elector for Alabama, its law requires that he must pawn his ballot to a candidate not yet named, by a convention not yet held, of delegates not yet chosen. Even if the nominee repudiates the platform adopted by the same convention, as Democratic nominees have twice done in my lifetime (1904, 1928), the elector is bound to vote for him. It will be seen that the State has sought to achieve control of the electors' ballots. But the balloting cannot be constitutionally subjected to any such control because it was intended to be free, an act performed after all functions of the electoral process left to the States have been completed. The Alabama Supreme Court held that such a requirement violates the Federal Constitution, and I agree.

It may be admitted that this law does no more than to make a legal obligation of what has been a voluntary general practice. If custom were sufficient authority for amendment of the Constitution by Court decree, the decision in this matter would be warranted. Usage may sometimes impart changed content to constitutional generalities, such as 'due process of law,' 'equal protection,' or 'commerce among the states.' But I do not think powers or discretions granted to federal officials by the Federal Constitution can be forfeited by the Court for disuse. A political practice which has its origin in custom must rely upon custom for its sanctions.

The demise of the whole electoral system would not impress me as a disaster. At its best it is a mystifying and distorting factor in presidential elections which may resolve a popular defeat into an electoral victory. At its worst it is open to local corruption and manipulation, once so flagrant as to threaten the stability of the country. To abolish it and substitute direct election of the President, so that every vote wherever cast would have equal weight in calculating the result, would seem to me a gain for simplicity and integrity of our governmental processes.

But the Court's decision does not even move in that direction. What it is doing is to entrench the worst features of the system in constitutional law and to elevate the perversion of the forefathers' plan into a constitutional principle. This judicial overturn of the theory that has come down to us can not plead the excuse that it is a practical remedy for the evils or weaknesses of the system.

The Court is sanctioning a new instrument of power in the hands of any faction that can get control of the Democratic National Convention to make it sure of Alabama's electoral vote. When the party is in power this will likely be the administration faction and when not in power no one knows what group it will be. This device of prepledged and oath-bound electors imposes upon the party within the State an oath-bound regularity and loyalty to the controlling element in the national party. It centralizes party control and, instead of securing for the locality a share in the central management, it secures the central management in dominance of the local vote in the Electoral College. If we desire free elections, we should not add to the leverage over local party representatives always possessed by those who enjoy the prestige and dispense the patronage of a national administration.

The view of many that it is the progressive or liberal element of the party that will presently advantage from this device does not prove that the device itself has any proper place in a truly liberal or progressive scheme of government. Who will come to possess this weapon and to whose advantage it will prove in the long run I am not foresighted enough to predict. But party control entrenched by disfranchisement and exclusion of nonconforming party members is a means which to my mind can not be justified by any end. In the interest of free government, we should foster the power and the will to be independent even on the part of those we may think to be independently wrong.

Candidates for elector, like those for Senator, of course, may announce to their constituents their policies and preferences, and assume a moral duty to carry them out if they are chosen. Competition in the primary between those of different views would forward the representative principle. But this plan effects a complete suppression of competition between different views within the party. All who are not ready to follow blindly anyone chosen by the national convention are excluded from the primary, and that, in practice, means also from the election.

It is not for me, as a judge, to pass upon the wisdom or righteousness of the political revolt this measure was designed to suppress. For me it is enough that, be it ever so benevolent and virtuous, the end cannot justify these means.

I would affirm the decision of the Supreme Court of Alabama.

Notes