吃瓜大本营

In a victory for voting rights, a federal district court sided with two civic engagement organizations that challenged the Kansas law, concluding that it violated the First Amendment. When the state appealed that decision to the Tenth Circuit, the ACLU鈥攋oined by our affiliate in Kansas and O鈥橫elveny & Myers LLP鈥攆iled an amicus brief to emphasize the force of the First Amendment protections afforded to the political speech at issue in this case.

As the Supreme Court has explained, speech encouraging others to participate in the political process 鈥渋s an essential mechanism of democracy,鈥� because it 鈥渋s the means to hold officials accountable to the people鈥� and 鈥渢o achieve political change.鈥� As a result, the First Amendment鈥檚 protections are at their zenith when applied to this kind of core political speech.

We urged the court to resist the state鈥檚 efforts to weaken those protections just because that speech is tangentially related to the electoral process. These efforts to diminish the First Amendment鈥檚 force are especially wrongheaded when it comes to laws regulating speech by third-party civic engagement organizations, which do not implicate the state鈥檚 interest in regulating electoral mechanics, and serve only to punish third parties for encouraging people to vote.

This case is currently pending before the Tenth Circuit.