# Sandusky County Democratic Party v. Blackwell **Status: stub — expand.** **Nos. 04-4265, 04-4266 (6th Cir., decided 26 October 2004), per curiam.** Decided a week before the 2004 presidential election, on an emergency posture, and still the controlling federal authority on what a provisional ballot is worth. Three holdings, which together define the shape of provisional voting in the United States: 1. **The right to be handed a provisional ballot is privately enforceable.** Section 302(a) of the [[Help America Vote Act]] — "shall be permitted to cast a provisional ballot" — is mandatory, rights-creating language, and so is enforceable by an individual voter under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, even though HAVA supplies no private cause of action of its own. "The right to cast a provisional ballot is neither vague nor amorphous." 2. **The right to have it counted does not exist in federal law.** "HAVA does not require that any particular ballot, whether provisional or 'regular,' must be counted as valid." Countability is a question of state law. States remain free to count provisional ballots cast outside the voter's precinct — they are simply not required to. 3. **"Jurisdiction" in the voter's affirmation means the precinct, not the county.** The district court had read it as the county, the unit that actually holds registration records. The Sixth Circuit reversed, relying in part on a floor statement by Senator Bond, and held that "being eligible under state law to vote means eligible to vote in this specific election in this specific polling place." The court noted this reading was not necessary to its holding on counting. Affirmed in part, reversed in part, remanded. The practical effect is that the wrong-precinct question — the single largest variable in whether a provisional ballot survives — is answered fifty different ways rather than once. ## See also - [[How a Provisional Ballot Is Cast and Counted]] · [[Help America Vote Act]] · [[Provisional Ballot]] · [[Voter Suppression]]