Cite as: 517 U. S. 186 (1996)
Thomas, J., dissenting
has created an unfair electoral system by granting parties automatic access to the ballot, the proper course of action is to bring suit against the appropriate state official and challenge the ballot-access statute itself, see, e. g., Burdick v. Takushi, supra, not to bring a preclearance suit against the Party and contest the registration fee. If the State sought to enact or administer a law limiting ballot access to only one group, as Justice Stevens repeatedly hypothesizes, see, e. g., ante, at 223, state action would most likely exist, and that law would be subject to § 5 and those provisions of the Constitution that impose restrictions on the States.
As for the point that Virginia allows the Party to choose its method of nomination, that fact does not warrant a finding of state action either. We have made it clear that an organization's "exercise of the choice allowed by state law where the initiative comes from it and not from the State, does not make its action in doing so 'state action.' " Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison, supra, at 357. Thus, when the Party exercised the choice afforded it by state law and opted to hold a convention, that decision did not amount to state action. The Party did not take the initiative to make that choice in order to serve the public interest; in reality, the selection of a nomination method is an intensely political matter, as recent
are, like most corporations, substantially advantaged by various provisions of state law. See, e. g., Va. Code Ann. §§ 13.1-692.1, 13.1-870.1 (1993) (creating a limitation on liability for corporate officers and directors). I doubt seriously, however, that even the Members of today's majority would hold that when a corporation takes the necessary steps to invoke these statutory benefits, it thereby becomes a state actor; yet this is the logical result of the suggestion that the Party is a state actor because Virginia automatically places its nominee on the ballot. Such a conclusion would run headfirst into our case law, in which we have stated unequivocally that privately owned corporations, absent some symbiotic relationship with the State, are purely private actors. See Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison, 419 U. S., at 357-358; Blum v. Yaretsky, 457 U. S. 991, 1011 (1982).
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