Chapter 3 (Wisc. 1981), the issue was whether a referendum election should be rerun when 40% of the electorate were not allowed to vote, even if the result of the election would not have changed if all of those voters had voted. The ballot question asked if the county seat should be moved. There were statutory deadlines by which petitions had to be submitted to get the question on the ballot, and by which the question had to be publicized. All of the deadlines were missed, although none of the tardiness was the fault of the petitioners. The matter was further confused when conflicting legal opinions were issued on whether putting the referendum question on the ballot was allowed, and whether election officials could be subject to criminal prosecution for distributing the ballots with the referendum question on them. McNally is discussed in detail in Chapter 5. For now, our focus is on the approach the Wisconsin Supreme Court took to the many violations of statutory requirements in the case. The supreme court began by saying, [T]he Court has traditionally looked to the specific statutory election provisions involved to determine whether they were “directory or mandatory” provisions. The Court has consistently sought to preserve the will of the electors by construing election provisions as directory if there has been substantial compliance with their terms… This case, however, is fundamentally different from other election cases considered by this Court… At 444 (internal citation omitted) (emphasis supplied). The supreme court then decided the case in light of the significant deprivations of fundamental voting rights that were involved in the disenfranchisement of nearly half of the voters. The test of substantial compliance was the key to determining whether Peter McDonough, the Democratic incumbent, or John Coughlin, his Republican opponent, won election as the county attorney in Hillsborough County, New Hampshire, on November 2, 2002, in In re McDonough, 816 A.2d 1022 (N.H. 2003). After a recount of ballots, which had been requested by Mr. McDonough, Mr. Coughlin won by 126 votes. Then Mr. McDonough contested 269 ballots. Elections in New Hampshire allowed for straight-ticket voting as well as voting for individual candidates. A voter could mark the ballot to vote for all candidates in a particular political party (a straight ticket), or a voter could mark the ballot for the individual candidates on it. Or a voter could do both: if a voter marked a preference for a straight ticket, and also marked the ballot for particular candidates, then the New Hampshire law said that the voter’s preferences for the individually marked candidates would be counted, and in those races for which the voter had put no mark for an individual candidate, the voter’s straight-ticket choice would be counted for that office. The voter marked the ballot by darkening in an oval next to the name of the party or of the candidate. The ballots Mr. McDonough challenged were those of voters who marked the ballot for a straight ticket for the Republican Party, and marked the ballot for some individual candidates but not for the candidates in the county attorney race. The question for the court was whether a skipped race (unmarked when a 75