The Resolution of Election Disputes: Legal Principles that Control Election Challenges As discussed in Chapter 3 in Pullen v. Mulligan, 561 N.E.2d 585 (Ill. 1990),79 Penny Pullen ran against Rosemary Mulligan for the Republican Party nomination as a candidate for the Illinois House of Representatives but lost to Ms. Mulligan by a flip of a coin after the trial court determined that the election resulted in a tie vote. Among the issues on appeal were whether some uninitialed ballots should be counted and others should not be counted. Paper ballots were used in the election. Under Illinois law, a paper ballot could not be counted unless it had a polling place official’s initials on it. The Illinois Supreme Court said that the initialing process was necessary to preserve the integrity of the election because it was the only means of distinguishing between ballots that were legally cast and ballots that were illegally cast in the polling places. Some of the ballots cast by voters at the polls during the election in Pullen had not been initialed by the election judges, and the parties agreed that those ballots should not be counted. But some absentee ballots, which had remained in their envelopes and were opened at the polls only after the election was over, were treated differently. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled that, because the absentee ballots remained unopened until the polls closed, having the ballots initialed by the election judges at that point would not prevent ballot box stuffing and initialing was not necessary to preserving the integrity of the election process. Those ballots were counted. A similar result was reached in Wilbourn v. Hobson, 608 So.2d 1187 (Miss. 1992), another case discussed in Chapter 3. Hershel Wilbourn and Peggy Hobson ran for a seat on the Hinds County, Mississippi, Board of Supervisors (county council). Voting machines were used in that election, but a paper ballot, known as an affidavit ballot, was used by voters whose names were not on the polling place lists. Under state law, paper ballots had to be initialed on the back by a poll worker before the ballot was given to the voter, but the state law which applied to affidavit ballots was silent about initialing. The initialing requirement was meant to preclude people from stuffing the ballot box by secretly putting into the ballot box additional ballots they brought with them into the polling place. Several affidavit ballots cast by legitimate registered voters for Mr. Wilborn had not been initialed by poll workers. The Mississippi Supreme Court decided that those ballots should be counted because, among other reasons, the affidavit ballots cannot be used in ballot box stuffing: they are not put into the ballot box, but instead are held separately and counted separately. Moreover, the parties had stipulated that no fraud took place. C. An unusual mark on a ballot is not evidence of fraud if the ballot shows the voter’s intent and the mark is not meant to identify the voter. There also are cases where courts had to face the anti-fraud concerns on a ballot-by-ballot basis and decide whether an individual voter’s will could be determined from the way the ballot was marked. In these cases, state anti-fraud statutes required the ballots to be marked in a very specific way and prohibited any marks on the ballots other than the authorized marks for a candidate. These laws were designed to prevent vote buying schemes where a voter would be paid to vote for a particular candidate and, in addition to marking the ballot for that candidate, to put another mark on the ballot to identify it as the voter’s ballot. That way, paid voters could prove they marked the ballot for the candidate they were paid to vote for, and they would get credit for having cast the ballot as they were paid to do. This prohibition against additional identifying marks was an important element of the election challenge in Devine v. Wonderlich, 268 N.W.2d 620 (Iowa 1978), where the candidate who initially was determined to have been elected as a Keokuk, Iowa, county supervisor (commissioner) in 1976 was not even on the ballot. Francis P. Devine, a Democrat, had lost an election for the same seat by 50 votes two years earlier, in 1974, and had decided not to try again. But nobody filed to run in the Democratic primary in 1976, Pullen also was discussed in Chapter 1. 79 94