The Resolution of Election Disputes: Legal Principles that Control Election Challenges D.1. The requirements of a mandatory law will not be enforced if the goals for which it was designed cannot be achieved The trial court’s analysis relied on a 1986 Illinois case, Craig v. Peterson, 233 N.E.2d 345, which held that the initialing requirement was directory. In Craig, none of the absentee ballots from 14 precincts were initialed. Because people who voted in the precincts on election day in Craig used voting machines, the absentee ballots were the only paper ballots in that election. The Craig court said that the initialing requirement usually is mandatory because it allows election judges to distinguish between the ballots they put in the ballot box and the ballots they did not, which is a safeguard against ballot box “stuffing” and other fraudulent practices. But in Craig there were no legal ballots to be separated from illegal ballots based on the presence or absence of the election judges’ initials, because there were no paper ballots except the absentee ballots, and none of them had initials—there was no comparison to be made. As described in Pullen, the Craig court found that “statutory requirements which deprive qualified voters of their right to have their vote counted, without fault on the part of the voters, are constitutionally suspect where such requirements do not contribute to the integrity of the election process.” At 597. Since the initialing requirement was not necessary to ensure the integrity of the election in Craig, the court there construed the requirement to be directory. The supreme court in Pullen then studied the parallels between Pullen and Craig to determine whether the facts in Pullen satisfied the two-pronged test in Craig for deciding that the initialing requirement was directory for absentee ballots: 1) that the in-precinct and absentee ballots can be distinguished and 2) that the initialing requirement was unnecessary to maintain the integrity of the election. It found that even though in Pullen all the ballots were paper ballots, the ballots cast in the precincts had pre-printed precinct numbers on them while the ballots cast absentee had handwritten precinct numbers on them. So the in-precinct ballots could be distinguished from the absentee ballots, and the first prong of the Craig formulation was satisfied. The supreme court said it found the second prong to be a closer question, but its analysis is brief and straightforward. The court noted 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. But the absentee ballots were not cast in the polling places. Rather, they remained unopened until the polls closed, and were opened only after the polls closed. At that point, having the ballots initialed by the election judges at the polling place would not prevent ballot box stuffing. And since the initialing of the ballots was not necessary to the function for which it was designed, it was not necessary to preserving the integrity of the election process. The other irregularities in the 1990 election were then addressed by the Illinois Supreme Court. A statute said that the back of the ballot had to say Primary Ballot and have the precinct name, the date of the election and a facsimile of the signature of the official who requested that the ballots be printed. Some ballots did not identify the precinct. After citing three Illinois cases from between 1918 and 1921 that had voided elections and ballots because similar information was missing from the ballots, the court in Pullen relied on a 1958 Illinois case, Hester v. Kamykowski, 150 N.E.2d 196, that overruled all of those older cases, saying the “unintentional errors in printing will not void the ballot where they do not affect the merits of the election.” The Pullen court then quoted the conclusion of the court in Hester, “‘By enforcing with too great technical exactness the provisions concerning the form of ballots the very object of those provisions in securing a fair election may be defeated.’” At 600. By this reasoning, the Pullen 62