Cite as: 530 U. S. 567 (2000)
Opinion of the Court
(Addendum to Mervin Field Report). One expert went so far as to describe it as "inevitable [under Proposition 198] that parties will be forced in some circumstances to give their official designation to a candidate who's not preferred by a majority or even plurality of party members." Tr. 421 (expert testimony of Bruce Cain).
In concluding that the burden Proposition 198 imposes on petitioners' rights of association is not severe, the Ninth Circuit cited testimony that the prospect of malicious crossover voting, or raiding, is slight, and that even though the numbers of "benevolent" crossover voters were significant, they would be determinative in only a small number of races.9 169 F. 3d, at 656-657. But a single election in which the party nominee is selected by nonparty members could be enough to destroy the party. In the 1860 Presidential election, if opponents of the fledgling Republican Party had been able to cause its nomination of a proslavery candidate in place of Abraham Lincoln, the coalition of intra-party factions forming behind him likely would have disinte-grated, endangering the party's survival and thwarting its effort to fill the vacuum left by the dissolution of the Whigs. See generally 1 Political Parties & Elections in the United States: An Encyclopedia 398-408, 587 (L. Maisel ed. 1991). Ordinarily, however, being saddled with an unwanted, and possibly antithetical, nominee would not destroy the party but severely transform it. "[R]egulating the identity of the parties' leaders," we have said, "may . . . color the parties' message and interfere with the parties' decisions as to the best means to promote that message." Eu, 489 U. S., at 231, n. 21.
In any event, the deleterious effects of Proposition 198 are not limited to altering the identity of the nominee. Even
9 The Ninth Circuit defined a crossover voter as one "who votes for a candidate of a party in which the voter is not registered. Thus, the cross-over voter could be an independent voter or one who is registered to a competing political party." 169 F. 3d 646, 656 (1999).
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