Page:United States Reports 502 OCT. TERM 1991.pdf/453

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

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

295

Opinion of the Court

C Up to this point, the positions of petitioners and the Board have coincided. They diverge on only one matter: whether requiring the candidates for the suburban-district commissioner seats to obtain 25,000 nominating signatures from the suburbs unduly burdens their right to run for those seats under the Party name. Although petitioners suggest that their showing of support in the city district should qualify their candidates to represent the Party in all races within Cook County, in the absence of any claim that the division of Cook County into separate districts is itself unconstitutional, our precedents foreclose the argument. According to the Board’s uncontested arithmetic, the 25,000 signature rule requires the support of only slightly more than 2% of suburban voters, see Brief for Respondent Board in No. 90–1126, p. 9, and n. 7, a considerably more lenient restriction than the one we upheld in Jenness v. Fortson, 403 U. S. 431 (1971) (involving a 5% requirement). Just as the State may not cite the Party’s failure in the suburbs as reason for disqualifying its candidates in urban Cook County, neither may the Party cite its success in the city district as a sufficient condition for running candidates in the suburbs. IV These cases present one final issue, which we are unable to resolve. Some of Cook County’s judges are elected by citizens of the entire county, and others by citizens of the separate districts. In responding to Reed’s objection that the HWP had not fielded candidates for any elected judicial offices in Cook County, the Circuit Court held that, under § 10–2, “the exclusion of judicial candidates on the slate was a failure to fulfill the ‘complete slate requirement’ of the Election Code.” The court then overruled the Electoral Board and treated this failure as an alternative ground for invalidating the Party’s entire slate.