352
Opinion of the Court
ballot issues that present neither a substantial risk of libel nor any potential appearance of corrupt advantage.15 It applies not only to leaflets distributed on the eve of an election, when the opportunity for reply is limited, but also to those distributed months in advance.16 It applies no matter what the character or strength of the author's interest in anonymity. Moreover, as this case also demonstrates, the absence of the author's name on a document does not necessarily protect either that person or a distributor of a forbidden document from being held responsible for compliance with the Election Code. Nor has the State explained why it can
15 "The risk of corruption perceived in cases involving candidate elections, e. g., United States v. Automobile Workers, [352 U. S. 567 (1957)]; United States v. CIO, [335 U. S. 106 (1948)], simply is not present in a popular vote on a public issue." First Nat. Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U. S. 765, 790 (1978) (footnote omitted).
16 As the Illinois Supreme Court explained in People v. White, 116 Ill. 2d 171, 180, 506 N. E. 2d 1284, 1288 (Ill. 1987), which struck down a similar statute: "Implicit in the State's . . . justification is the concern that the public could be misinformed and an election swayed on the strength of an eleventh-hour anonymous smear campaign to which the candidate could not meaningfully respond. The statute cannot be upheld on this ground, however, because it sweeps within its net a great deal of anonymous speech completely unrelated to this concern. In the first place, the statute has no time limit and applies to literature circulated two months prior to an election as well as that distributed two days before. The statute also prohibits anonymous literature supporting or opposing not only candidates, but also referenda. A public question clearly cannot be the victim of character assassination."
The temporal breadth of the Ohio statute also distinguishes it from the Tennessee law that we upheld in Burson v. Freeman, 504 U. S. 191 (1992). The Tennessee statute forbade electioneering within 100 feet of the entrance to a polling place. It applied only on election day. The State's interest in preventing voter intimidation and election fraud was therefore enhanced by the need to prevent last-minute misinformation to which there is no time to respond. Moreover, Tennessee geographically confined the reach of its law to a 100-foot no-solicitation zone. By contrast, the Ohio law forbids anonymous campaign speech wherever it occurs.
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