Disclosure Requirement Upheld

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed a decision regarding disclosure requirements for candidates for federal office

The plaintiff here lodges a challenge to the felony-disclosure requirement for a candidate running for federal office in North Carolina. This state law requires that candidates check a box indicating if they have any felony convictions and then submit a short supplemental form with basic information regarding such convictions and the restoration of citizenship rights. The district court upheld the statute. Because the felony disclosure requirement falls within the Constitution’s broad grant of authority to the states to regulate elections, we now affirm. We remand appellant’s challenge to a separate
address-disclosure requirement to the district court with directions to dismiss that claim as moot.

The candidate

Siddhanth Sharma (“Sharma”) is a twenty-seven-year-old convicted felon who currently resides in Wake County, North Carolina. In September 2023, Sharma announced his candidacy for North Carolina’s Thirteenth Congressional District seat in the State’s 2024 Republican primary election. Sharma’s full citizenship rights had been restored on September 3, 2023, and he registered to vote on September 5. J.A. 233.

The court

Over the past five years, North Carolina has been flooded with dozens of challenges to the State’s electoral regulations. We understand that many of these challenges are reasonably grounded in the law, and their gravity should not be understated. At the same time, the constant pull to the courtroom leaves state election officials frequently operating
in a provisional state, never knowing if and when their procedures will be overturned.

This state of affairs is not conducive to the most efficient administration of elections. “[R]unning a statewide election is a complicated endeavor. Lawmakers [] must make a host of difficult decisions about how best to structure and conduct the election.” Democratic Nat’l Comm. v. Wis. State Legislature, 141 S. Ct. 28, 31 (2020) (mem.) (Kavanaugh, J., concurring in denial of application to vacate stay). Often, a board of elections must either choose to forego policies that serve significant governmental interests in preserving electoral integrity, or risk enforcing potentially unconstitutional measures that could throw a shadow over an entire federal election. Neither option is desirable. “When an election is close at hand, the rules of the road should be clear and settled.” Id. And some modicum of stability assists candidates in knowing when and where they will run, and voters in knowing who would represent them. These lines of communication are important to representative government, and their value is among those things that courts may keep in mind. Both the stability of state electoral procedures and the place of state governments in the Article I elections scheme are under challenge in these sorts of cases, but here again the courts may, under law, take account of both.

We affirm the district court’s holding that North Carolina’s felony-disclosure requirement is constitutional.

(Mike Frisch)