The Resolution of Election Disputes: Legal Principles that Control Election Challenges question. Literal compliance with directory provisions will not be required if it appears that the spirit of the law has not been violated and the result of the election has been fairly ascertained. At 595-596 (emphasis supplied). When the case was sent back to the trial court for a visual inspection of 27 punch-card ballots, the trial court concluded that seven of those ballots looked like they had been punched for Ms. Pullen and one for Ms. Mulligan. So Penny Pullen beat Rosemary Mulligan by six votes. Most of the cases involving the resolution of election disputes (and most of the cases in all areas of law) have attempted to achieve a result that is fair. The cases described in Chapter 3—which discusses mandatory and directory requirements—can be seen as attempts by courts to apply the concept of fairness to statutory dictates. But what if people who were eligible to vote were not allowed to vote at all? How would the standard of fairness apply? At first blush, it sounds as if an election should be voided if eligible voters were prevented from voting, because an election is a process by which eligible voters are allowed to cast their ballots. If some people were purposefully kept from casting their ballots, one might argue, then the election process failed—in essence, the polling exercise did not fit the definition of an election—and should not have any effect. But what if the number of people prevented from voting was not enough to make a difference in the result, i.e., the election would come out the same way with or without the votes of the people who were excluded? Is that fact important? When does an irregularity that prevents a portion of the electorate from casting their ballots become grounds for voiding the results of the election? This question was squarely faced in McNally v. Tollander, 302 N.W.2d 440 (Wisc. 1981). The case started out, as so many election disputes do, as a disagreement about the timing of a notice. In fact, if all Wisconsin’s statutory timing and notice procedures had been followed, this issue would never have turned into a lawsuit about the abridgment of the right to vote. However, county officials failed to follow the correct procedures a number of times and the result was that nearly half the county was unable to vote. A group of people living in the central part of Burnett County, Wisconsin, wanted to have a referendum on whether to move the county seat from the Village of Grantsburg in the western part of the county, where the courthouse was inadequate and the jail was about to be condemned, to the Town of Siren, which was more centrally located in the county. They wanted the referendum to be on the ballot for the November 2, 1976 election. The state statute concerning moving a county seat required a petition asking for the move to be signed by one-half of the county freeholders, filed with the county clerk and given to the county board of supervisors (commissioners). The people who wanted the county seat moved filed their petition in plenty of time, but the county waited eight months before it got around to the petition. When they finally determined the number of signatures that were needed, they found that the petition had too few signatures. At that point, it was already nearly two months after the time that the county was required to publish a notice of the referendum. Still, additional signatures were filed in September 1976 (less than two months before the election), and the county board determined that there were an adequate number of signatures. The county board ordered the county clerk to prepare and send out the ballots for the referendum88 but the county clerk 88 On November 20, 1975, the proponents of the move filed a petition. A state statute required notice of the referendum be published on the last Tuesday in May and the first Tuesday in June, 1976. The county board appointed a committee that got the petition on July 23, 1976, and determined that the petition had 2,486 signatures and that there were 5,727 freeholders in the county. Since a simple majority of the number of freeholders was 2,864, the petition was more than 375 signatures short. Additional signatures were filed in July and August, and notice of the referendum was published on October 27 and 28, 1976, five months after the statutory deadline. 110