The Resolution of Election Disputes: Legal Principles that Control Election Challenges votes as they have been actually cast in an election duly held and completed in conformity with the legal requirements directing the appropriate conduct of elections. At 456. Simply stated, the court said that the question of whether a candidate is eligible to take office does not control the question of whether the votes that candidate got in the election should be given legal effect. The candidate in Barber died at noon on election day. It was Robert W. Bonenfant. He was running against Robert Barber and Emile Roy in the Democratic Party primary on June 19, 1972, for sheriff of Androscoggin County, Maine. The vote in that election was: Robert W. Bonenfant Robert Barber Emile Roy 6,135 2,884 2,691 In accordance with Maine statutes the governor proclaimed that Mr. Bonenfant was the nominee, that he had died, and that there was a vacancy for a candidate to run for sheriff. The governor directed the county’s Democratic Party to nominate a candidate to run for sheriff. Then Mr. Barber filed his lawsuit saying that he was nominated in the election in accordance with the state law that says the winner is the “person who receive[d] a plurality of the votes cast for nomination” and that his name should go on the ballot as the Democratic nominee. The Maine Supreme Court paraphrased Mr. Barber’s position in a distinctly unfriendly way: “The asserted ground for such total obliteration of the legal effectiveness of 6,135 votes cast is that the noontime death, while the primary was in progress, of…Robert W. Bonenfant…suffices, ipso facto, to nullify absolutely all legal effectiveness of the total votes thus cast.” At 455-456. Unfortunately for Mr. Barber, that is exactly what he was asserting. After separating the issues of Mr. Bonenfant’s ability to take office from the legitimacy of his votes, as set out above, the supreme court said that the issue of the legitimacy of Mr. Bonenfant’s votes …must be evaluated, and decided, on the basis of the unique public policy considerations which derive from governmental concern to respect the will of the electorate as it has been objectively manifested in votes which have been actually cast. These policy considerations dictate that the objective results of elections conducted to actual completion, in accordance with legal directives prescribed for the procedural course of the election and the tabulation of its outcome, shall be accorded, rather than denied maximum possible legal effectiveness… It is in light of this public policy that the overwhelming weight of authority in the United States has developed the principle that a person’s ineligibility to take, or hold, office will not be permitted to vitiate absolutely and totally the legal effectiveness of the votes actually cast for him in a lawfully conducted election. At 456 (emphasis supplied). In other words, the votes cast for a candidate who is ineligible to take office will be counted in determining who won the election. 116