Cite as: 504 U. S. 428 (1992)
Opinion of the Court
tify their candidate of choice until days before the primary. But in Storer v. Brown, we gave little weight to "the interest the candidate and his supporters may have in making a late rather than an early decision to seek independent ballot status." 415 U. S., at 736.6 Cf. Rosario v. Rockefeller, 410 U. S. 752, 757 (1973). We think the same reasoning applies here and therefore conclude that any burden imposed by Hawaii's write-in vote prohibition is a very limited one. "To conclude otherwise might sacrifice the political stability of the system of the State, with profound consequences for the entire citizenry, merely in the interest of particular candidates and their supporters having instantaneous access to the ballot." Storer, supra, at 736.7
Because he has characterized this as a voting rights rather than ballot access case, petitioner submits that the write-in prohibition deprives him of the opportunity to cast a meaningful ballot, conditions his electoral participation upon the
6 In Storer, we upheld a California ballot access law that refused to recognize independent candidates until a year after they had disaffiliated from a political party.
7 The dissent complains that, because primary voters are required to opt for a specific partisan or nonpartisan ballot, they are foreclosed from voting in those races in which no candidate appears on their chosen ballot and in those races in which they are dissatisfied with the available choices. Post, at 444. But this is generally true of primaries; voters are required to select a ticket, rather than choose from the universe of candidates running on all party slates. Indeed, the Court has upheld the much more onerous requirement that voters interested in participating in a primary election enroll as a member of a political party prior to the preceding general election. Rosario v. Rockefeller, 410 U. S. 752 (1973). Cf. American Party of Texas, supra, at 786 ("[T]he State may determine that it is essential to the integrity of the nominating [petition] process to confine voters to supporting one party and its candidates in the course of the same nominating process").
If the dissent were correct in suggesting that requiring primary voters to select a specific ballot impermissibly burdened the right to vote, it is clear under our decisions that the availability of a write-in option would not provide an adequate remedy. Anderson, supra, at 799, n. 26; Lubin v. Panish, 415 U. S. 709, 719, n. 5 (1974).
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