Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Saint Paul, City of, The

Background

The parties filed cross-motions for summary judgment, a procedure allowing the court to decide a case when there is no genuine dispute over important facts and one side is entitled to judgment under the law.

Saint Paul’s 2018 ordinance required landlords, when signing a lease or when a tenant first moved in, to give tenants age eighteen or older information about their right to register to vote in Minnesota and instructions for registering. Violating the requirement was a petty misdemeanor. Minneapolis had a similar ordinance requiring licensed-property owners to provide city-approved voter-registration information to adult tenants when they first moved in. Failure to comply could result in loss of the landlord’s rental license.

The required flyers were prepared and controlled by the respective cities. They were printed on city letterhead, displayed the city logo, and included city-government contact information. The plaintiffs included Minnesota Voters Alliance and landlords in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. The landlord plaintiffs said they opposed the ordinances but distributed the flyers because they feared enforcement.

The plaintiffs alleged that the ordinances violated the First Amendment’s protection against compelled speech—the government’s forcing a person to communicate a message. They sought declarations that the ordinances were unconstitutional, permanent injunctions against enforcement, damages, and attorneys’ fees and costs.

First Amendment analysis

The court first considered whether the flyers were government speech. Because each city controlled the message and approved every word, the court concluded that the flyers were government speech rather than private speech. But the court rejected the cities’ argument that this ended the First Amendment analysis. The government’s ability to speak for itself does not include unlimited authority to force private people to deliver its message.

The court treated the ordinances as compelled-speech requirements. A law requiring someone to communicate a particular message is content-based because it changes the content of that person’s speech. Content-based speech regulations generally receive strict scrutiny, the most demanding constitutional test. Under strict scrutiny, the government must prove that the law serves a compelling government interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest.

The court rejected the cities’ argument for intermediate scrutiny, a less demanding test. The voter-registration information was factual and noncommercial, but the cities did not show that the information was part of landlords’ commercial speech. The court also explained that strict scrutiny is not limited to compelled ideological statements.

Strict-scrutiny ruling

The court accepted that the cities had identified a compelling government interest. The ordinances were intended to educate voters, reduce obstacles to renters’ voting, and reduce the difference in voting participation between renters and homeowners. The plaintiffs did not appear to dispute the compelling nature of those interests or the cited participation disparity.

The ordinances nevertheless failed the narrow-tailoring requirement. They applied only to new tenants and did not address existing tenants. The cities offered no evidence about how many renters were new tenants compared with existing tenants. The court said this underinclusiveness raised doubts about whether the ordinances were properly designed to increase participation among all renters.

The court also found no evidence that the flyers were effective. The cities did not show how many tenants received or read the flyers, whether tenants found them useful, or whether the flyers affected renter participation. The cities also did not explain why less restrictive alternatives—such as mailing information directly to tenants, distributing brochures, holding registration drives, or using willing messengers—would be inadequate.

The court rejected the cities’ focus on the fact that landlords did not have to pay for or print the flyers and that the information appeared nonpartisan. The relevant burden was not financial or practical inconvenience; it was forcing unwilling private speakers to serve as couriers for the government’s message. The court held that the cities had not shown that the ordinances were narrowly tailored to serve their compelling interest.

Disposition

The court held that both ordinances violated the First Amendment and were facially unconstitutional—that is, invalid in all their applications under the court’s ruling. The court granted the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment. It declared Saint Paul’s ordinance, Saint Paul Code of Ordinances chapter 48, section 48.02, facially unconstitutional and permanently enjoined Saint Paul from enforcing it. It also declared Minneapolis’s ordinance, Minneapolis Code of Ordinances section 244.2000(f), facially unconstitutional and permanently enjoined Minneapolis from enforcing it.

The court denied the defendants’ motion for summary judgment. The opinion stated that any request for damages, attorneys’ fees, or costs would need to be made by a separate motion supported by legal and factual argument.