Conclusion • A court will void the election and require that it be run again when: o o o there is proof that ballots have been illegally cast, and the court cannot determine for which candidate those ballots were cast, and either the number of undetermined votes is greater than the margin of votes between the candidates or the entire election is tainted by fraud. • Criminal behavior will void an election only if it changed the election result or made the result impossible to determine. This fact does not preclude a separate criminal prosecution of the offenders. Chapter 6. Factual Findings of a Lower Court or Administrative Body Will Stand Unless They are Clearly Wrong • • • A reviewing court is not to substitute its view of a case for the decision made by an administrative body or lower court. A reviewing court can only determine whether the decision of an administrative body or trial court was unsupported by substantial evidence, was based upon an erroneous interpretation of the law or was arbitrary or capricious. A reviewing court will reverse the decision of an administrative body or trial court if that decision was against the manifest weight of the evidence. Throughout the book, there are cases where it appears that someone should be punished for what they did in the election process. For example, the person who had his rival’s campaign workers jailed, the deputy sheriffs who harassed and intimidated people to vote in favor of an annexation, the election official who purposefully rejected the directive that people who give assistance to voters must execute an affidavit, and the person who bought votes. But the cases talk only about the effect of those actions on the election process, and often those actions did not necessarily mean that the election result should be overturned. However, the fact that such actions might not lead a court to overturn an election is not a license for people to attempt to disrupt elections or bully voters. If the actions of an election officer, candidate or other person were so flagrant as to warrant punishment, that punishment would be the subject of a separate proceeding—which could be anything from a job-related disciplinary proceeding to a criminal prosecution—despite their effect on the outcome of the election. One more caution is in order. In this book, we have seen courts in different cases apply similar legal principles to similar facts and reach seemingly contradictory conclusions. What was going on under the surface of these court decisions? What good are legal principles if they can’t be applied uniformly? One answer is that cases that seem to be wrongly decided can be analyzed according to the way the judges viewed the facts against the template of the will of the electorate. Using this approach, a well-presented case will win the day if the facts are within the bounds of the prevailing legal principles and the desired outcome manifests the will of the electorate. This is the viewpoint from which this book is written. On the other hand, sometimes cases are decided wrongly; the prevailing legal principles either are not followed or are applied to reach a conclusion that is not justified by the facts. Wrongly decided cases often are dealt with through decisions in later cases that limit or overturn the precedent established in the wrongly decided case. In these circumstances, courts in later cases commonly will say that the decision in 133