The U.S. Supreme Court will soon hear arguments in a free speech case involving a Minnesota law that prohibits citizens from wearing shirts, hats, buttons, or other items sporting the logo of any organization with “recognizable political views.” As a result of this law, poll workers have repeatedly forced voters to remove or cover up hats, shirts, or buttons, and they have even forbidden voters from wearing shirts with the word “Liberty” and the classic Revolutionary War flag—the “Gadsden flag”—featuring a snake with the words “Don’t Tread on Me.”
In a friend of the court brief filed last week, the Goldwater Institute, which defeated two similar policies in Arizona in lawsuits filed almost a decade ago, is urging the Court to find that the Minnesota ban violates the First Amendment. While the government should prevent disorder in polling places, it shouldn’t be in the business of telling people they can’t express themselves in respectful ways.
“This case is the latest example of a disturbing trend of trying to block free expression in our democratic system,” said Timothy Sandefur, vice president for litigation at the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation. “The Minnesota law doesn’t just prevent disruption in the polling place—which is perfectly fine—it goes further, and forbids efforts to ‘persuade’ people. The government has no business trying to prevent ‘persuasion,’ as long as it’s peaceful.”
The Goldwater Institute fought and won two similar lawsuits in 2010 in Flagstaff and Phoenix, when polling place workers tried to forbid Tea Party members from wearing their Gadsden flag T-shirts to the polls, even though the shirts did not endorse candidates or issues. In both of those cases—Reed v. Purcell and Wickberg v. Owens—judges ruled that the government had violated voters’ free speech rights.
The Minnesota law is even broader than the Arizona restrictions at issue in those cases. As one federal judge noted, the Minnesota law would even forbid a person from wearing a shirt with the logo of the ACLU or the AFL-CIO.
“From campaign finance regulations to laws that force the disclosure of nonprofit donors’ home addresses and their employers’ names, freedom to express one’s opinion is increasingly under attack. But a functioning democratic system means respecting people’s rights to express themselves in a peaceful manner,” Sandefur says. “We’re asking the Supreme Court to declare that the government has no legitimate role in preventing ‘persuasion’ of any sort.”