The Resolution of Election Disputes: Legal Principles that Control Election Challenges Because we hold that the failure to provide ballots to forty percent of the voters by itself requires that the election be set aside, we need not consider whether the several other defects involved mandatory provisions that would provide additional bases for setting aside the election. At 444 (internal citation omitted). The supreme court said that the court of appeals was correct in its description of the general election dispute resolution rules, but …the facts of the case before us set it apart from the usual election contest case. First, the number of voters who were denied ballots in the present case was very substantial… Second…we are confronted with an entire class of voters whose right to participate in a referendum election was denied through no fault of their own. Then the supreme court noted an opinion it had entered in a 1963 case where it had suggested that …a case involving deprivation of the right to vote would be treated differently from the run of cases involving procedural irregularities. At 445 (emphasis supplied). Having defined the problem as one beyond the precedential application of cases involving procedural irregularities, the supreme court looked to the broader principles that apply to the basic right to vote. Thus, the supreme court first noted that the right to vote was established in the Wisconsin Constitution and that the Wisconsin Constitution also established a right to vote on moving a county seat. Then the supreme court described the principles that were at the heart of its decision. The right to vote is the principle means by which the consent of the governed, the abiding principal of our form of government, is obtained. As this court stated… …If citizens are deprived of that right, which lies at the very basis of our democracy, we will soon cease to be a democracy. For that reason no right is more jealously guarded and protected by the departments of government under our constitution, federal and state, than is the right of suffrage. It is a right which was enjoyed by the people before the adoption of the constitution and is one of the inherent rights which can be surrendered only by the people and subjected to limitation only by the fundamental law. At 446 (emphasis supplied). Next, after examining some cases in which individuals’ ballots were counted after having been mistakenly rejected by election officials, the supreme court said, While in [those cases] the right to vote could be vindicated by counting the defective ballots and upholding the election, that remedy is unavailable when the ballots were neither distributed nor cast. We conclude that the evidence of these 2,578 voters so undermines the appearance of fairness in the election that the election must be set aside. 112