Chapter 2 Next the supreme court distinguished the plight of the voters in Gray-Sadler, who were faced with confusing instructions for casting their ballots for the write-in candidates, from the ease with which the voters could vote for Mr. Murphy by just marking the ballot. The Court in Gray-Sadler distinguished between voter carelessness and circumstances beyond the voter’s control. Here there was no problem “beyond the voter[’s] control.” It is not too much to expect that a voter would notice that his candidate’s name appears as a choice on the ballot and that there is a clearly prescribed place on the ballot for expressing that choice… Given those facts, and recognizing that we cannot know for certain whether the same voter also cast a proper vote for Murphy and if so, whether it was counted, we see no basis for undoing the certification of the election results and ordering a run-off election. At 1182-1183. In the end, Mr. Murphy lost all of his challenges as well as the election. As was true of the contestants in Watertown, Mr. Murphy attempted to prove that the circumstances he complained about could have changed the result of the election, but neither the New Jersey Supreme Court nor the Iowa Supreme Court seriously addressed that question because the plaintiffs were unable to prove that an irregularity existed that violated the election laws. C. Harassment and intimidation do not materially affect the election unless they change its outcome. State laws make it illegal to interfere with voters at the polls.41 These laws allow law enforcement officials to arrest and prosecute people who harass or interfere with people at the polls. But what effect does the interference have on the validity of an election? The answer is none, unless the interference changes the results of the election or makes it impossible to determine the will of the electorate. Take, for instance, the case of Blocker v. City of Roosevelt City, 549 So.2d 90 (Ala. 1989). The case involved a 1988 election on the seemingly prosaic matter of whether people in Roosevelt City wanted to be annexed to the City of Birmingham, Alabama. It turned out that the election was anything but routine. The annexation carried by a vote of 718 to 404, but ten days later Clyde Blocker, Jr., and some other Roosevelt City voters filed an election contest claiming that voters were harassed and intimidated by employees of the Jefferson County sheriff ’s department and others to persuade the voters to vote in favor of the annexation. Mr. Blocker and the other plaintiffs, presumably aware of their burden of proof, said that the annexation would have been defeated if the harassed voters’ votes were subtracted, and asked that the annexation election be declared illegal and void. In other words, they claimed that the irregularities would have changed the result of the election. 41 See, e.g., the laws listed state by state in Barry H. Weinberg and Lyn Utrecht, Problems in America’s Polling Places: How They Can Be Stopped, 11 Temp. Pol. & Civ. Rts. L. Rev., 401, 479 app. G. 35