Page:United States Reports 502 OCT. TERM 1991.pdf/449

 502us2$22M 08-19-96 17:40:23 PAGES OPINPGT

Cite as: 502 U. S. 279 (1992)

291

Opinion of the Court

To be sure, it is not ours to say that Illinois law lacks any constitutional procedural mechanism that petitioners might have been required to, but did not, follow before using the Party name. Our review of § 10–2 reveals the possibility that Illinois law empowers a newly established party’s candidate or candidates (here, Evans) merely to appoint party “committeemen,” whose authority to “manage and control the affairs” of the party might include an exclusive right to authorize the use of its name outside the party’s original political subdivision. It seems unlikely, however, that the Supreme Court of Illinois had such reasoning in mind. Any limitation on Evans’s power to authorize like-minded candidates to use the Party name would have had to arise under § 10–2, whereas the order below held simply that petitioners’ use of the Party name “violate[d] the provisions of section 10–5.” In any event, it is not this Court’s role to review a state-court decision on the basis of inconclusive and unargued theories of state law that the state court itself found unworthy of mention.9 B As an alternative basis for prohibiting petitioners from running together under the Party name, the Supreme Court of Illinois invoked the statutory requirement of § 10–2 that “[e]ach component of the petition for each district. . . be signed by [25,000] qualified voters of the district. . . .” The 9 Reed did seem to make a version of this argument in her brief to the Illinois Supreme Court. See Brief for Appellees Reed et al. in No. 70833 (Sup. Ct. Ill.), pp. 20–21. Moreover, in the one sentence that it devotes to the topic, the Circuit Court makes a similar observation: “While Timothy C. Evans was the only candidate of the Harold Washington Party, his only power, pursuant to § 10–2 of the Election Code, was the ability to appoint interim committeemen.” See App. to Pet. for Cert. in No. 90– 1435, p. 19a. Nonetheless, these passages are inadequate to prove that the Illinois Supreme Court adopted the argument, particularly since Reed arguably waived it by not raising it in her original “Objector’s Petition” to the Electoral Board. See App. 14–15. There, she claimed only that petitioners’ use of the Party name violated § 10–5.