The Resolution of Election Disputes: Legal Principles that Control Election Challenges In this case, a total of approximately thirteen voters have been deemed by the court, without deciding the issue, as disenfranchised… At 122. The 13 votes cast by people who were not eligible to vote were subtracted from Ms. Fell erhoff ��s victory margin of 62 votes, which meant she won the election by 49 votes. • In Pullen v. Mulligan, 561 N.E.2d 585 (Ill. 1990), Penny Pullen lost to Rosemary Mulligan by 31 votes in the 1990 primary election for nomination as the Republican Party candidate for the 55th District of the Illinois House of Representatives. After a recount, the judge ruled that some ballots should have been counted while others should not have been, and after the ballots that should not have been counted were subtracted from the candidates’ totals, the two candidates were tied. Ms. Mulligan won the nomination by a flip of a coin. On appeal, the litigants questioned whether some uninitialed ballots should be counted and whether ballots of people who voted in the wrong precinct or wrong district should be counted. After all of the Illinois Supreme Court’s reasoning and analysis, when the invalid ballots were subtracted from the candidates’ totals, the vote between Ms. Pullen and Ms. Mulligan was still tied. The case was sent back to the trial court for a visual inspection of 27 ballots, and the trial court concluded that seven of those ballots looked like they had been punched for Ms. Pullen and one for Ms. Mulligan. Those ballots were added to the candidates’ totals, and Penny Pullen beat Rosemary Mulligan by six votes. But the court will void the election and require that it be run again when: 1. there is proof that ballots have been illegally cast, 2. the court cannot determine for which candidate those ballots were cast, and 3. the number of undetermined votes is greater than the margin of votes between the candidates. We had a good example of this situation in Chapter 2. • In Green v. Reyes, 836 S.W.2d 203 (Tex. App. Houston 1992), Ben Reyes ran against Raymond Eugene Green for the nomination as the Democratic candidate to the United States House of Representatives for the 29th Congressional District in Texas. Mr. Green appeared to have won the nomination by 186 votes in the Democratic Party’s run-off primary election, but 429 people had illegally voted because they had voted earlier in the Republican Party’s primary election.85 (State law barred people from voting in one party’s primary election and then voting in another party’s run-off election in the same election cycle.) Under state law, the votes of those people who crossed over from one party’s election to the other’s were void. There were 220 illegal votes for Mr. Green, 75 illegal votes for Mr. Reyes and 8 votes that were not illegal. The illegal votes were subtracted from the candidates’ totals, leaving Mr. Green with a 41-vote margin of victory. But because there were also 126 crossover voters whose choice of candidate could not be determined, the entire election was declared void and a new election was ordered. This principle—that a court will void an election in which ballots are proven to have been illegally cast and in which the court cannot determine for whom ballots were cast—was honored in the breach by the majority opinion in another case from Chapter 2, Moreau v. Tonry, 339 So.2d 3(La. 1976), appeal dism., 430 U.S. 925 (1977). 85 A primary run-off election was needed because no candidate got a majority of the votes in the earlier primary election. Since a candidate needed a majority of the votes to be nominated, a run-off primary election was held between the two candidates who got the most votes in the earlier primary election. 104