U.S. Supreme Court MOORE v. OGILVIE, 394 U.S. 814 (1969) 394 U.S. 814

[Page 394 U.S. 814, 821]

the effort, have easily satisfied Illinois' 50-county, 200-signature requirement. Indeed, there is no suggestion that the counties from which the appellants drew their support were "populous" rather than "rural." The rationale of Reynolds v. Sims simply does not control this case.

Any reliance by the Court on Williams v. Rhodes, , would also be misplaced. That case involved an Ohio requirement that new political parties secure the support of over 433,000 persons - 15% of the electorate - before their candidates could appear on the ballot. Here, the 25,000 signatures required by Illinois represent only about one-half of one percent of the total number of Illinois voters - a percentage requirement permissible, one would hope, under any view of the Rhodes case. Nor do the appellants make any showing that securing 200 signatures in less than half of the State's counties would be a burden at all comparable to that involved in Williams v. Rhodes.

The Court held in MacDougall v. Green, 335 U.S. 281, in sustaining the very statutory requirement here at issue,[Footnote 1] that Illinois had pursued an "allowable State policy [of] requir[ing] that candidates for state-wide office should have support not limited to a concentrated locality." Id., at 283. That conclusion seems to me to be no less sound today than it was at the time of the MacDougall decision.[Footnote 2] Illinois' policy is, in fact, not at

[Page 394 U.S. 814, 822]

all unlike that upheld by the Court only two Terms ago in Dusch v. Davis, 387 U.S. 112, in which a district-residence requirement imposed upon municipal officers despite population variations among districts was nevertheless held proper as reasonably "reflect[ing] a detente between urban and rural communities . . . ." Id., at 117. Cf. Lucas v. Forty-Fourth General Assembly, 377 U.S. 713, 744 (STEWART, J., dissenting); Reynolds v. Sims, supra, at 589 (HARLAN, J., dissenting).

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