# Eggers v. Evnen **No. 22-2268 (8th Cir., 31 August 2022).** The Eighth Circuit upheld Nebraska's requirement that initiative sponsors gather signatures from 5 percent of the registered voters in each of 38 of the state's 93 counties, under Neb. Const. art. III, §§ 2 and 4. The court held that ballot access for an initiative is not a fundamental right for equal-protection purposes, and declined to follow the Ninth Circuit's contrary reasoning in *ACLU of Nevada v. Lomax* (2006), which had struck a Nevada county-distribution rule on one-person-one-vote grounds. An earlier district-court ruling against the Nebraska rule, *Bernbeck v. Gale* (D. Neb. 2014), had been reversed on standing without reaching the merits. The decision is the counterweight to [[Reclaim Idaho v. Denney]]: two neighbouring jurisdictions, one year apart, reached opposite conclusions about what a geographic distribution requirement does and what standard applies to it. Stage 4 of [[How a Ballot Measure Gets on the Ballot]] draws the pair.