After Friday's Missouri Supreme Court ruling said Rachel Johns doesn't qualify to run for state representative, her attorney told the News Tribune: "We do not consider this fight to be over, and we anticipate asking the U.S. Supreme Court to address this case."
Dave Roland, of the Freedom Center of Missouri, represents Johns, of St. Louis, who filed last spring as a Democratic candidate for state House District 76 in north St. Louis City.
But her name was removed from the ballot May 10 after St. Louis Circuit Judge Julian L. Bush ruled she didn't meet the state Constitution's qualifications of being a "qualified voter" for at least two years before the Nov. 8 general election, leaving the incumbent - Lincoln University graduate Joshua Peters - as the only candidate on the Aug. 2 Democratic Primary Election ballot for that seat.
Roland argues the Missouri Constitutional requirement violates U.S. Constitutional provisions.
The state high court heard oral arguments Thursday morning.
Thirty hours later, the four-judge majority ruled "qualified voter" in Missouri's Constitution "necessarily means that the representative must have been registered to vote" during the previous two years.
Johns - who moved to St. Louis from Memphis in August 2014, after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson - didn't register to vote until Feb. 4, 2015, well beyond the state Constitution's deadline.
She said she had not registered as a form of protest, because she didn't trust the political system.
She later registered to vote because a friend convinced her she should be active in the process.
Writing for the Missouri Supreme Court's four-judge majority, Judge Mary R. Russell said: "Johns' failure to register to vote does not qualify as symbolic speech. On this record, the only evidence that her failure to register was motivated by a desire to protest the political system is her own statements to that effect.
"While this Court does not doubt the sincerity of Johns' motivations both in abstaining from political involvement and now seeking an active role in government the law of symbolic speech clearly teaches that there must be more than mere conduct (and) the failure to register to vote is actually the absence of conduct."
Roland argued Missouri's two-year "durational voter registration requirement" violated the U.S. Constitution's First and Fourteenth amendments - and robbed voters in the House district of any choice if Johns were kept off the primary ballot.
Bush agreed with Peters. And Friday afternoon's 4-3 ruling upholding Bush ruling means Johns' name won't be returned to the Aug. 2 primary ballot.
"The State's interests in regulating the fairness of its elections and ensuring that candidates for state representative demonstrate sufficient seriousness about the electoral systems and social and civic engagement are legitimate," Russell wrote in a 25-page opinion.
Roland said Friday: "The majority worked hard to come up with reasons to ignore the cases that should have required ruling in our favor."
After presenting his case to the seven-judge court Thursday, Roland told reporters: "The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently - for at least 50 years - struck down restrictions on citizens' access to the political process, that violated the First and Fourteenth amendments."
He argued the state constitutional requirement only means a person's name is put on a list of registered voters, and "doesn't mean anything in terms of a citizen's ability to represent their friends and neighbors in the state Legislature," Roland added. "That's why it's important for the friends and neighbors to be the ones who make that decision."
The four-judge majority also noted Johns isn't banned permanently from the process - she'll meet the constitutional requirements in 2018.
In the dissent, Stith wrote: "The burden on Ms. Johns and on the (House district's) voters is far greater than acknowledged by the majority, the interests the State gives as justification for its implementation do not outweigh this burden and the burden is not necessary to effectuate those interests.
"Moreover, the description of the burden as only causing a two-year delay in running for office is not accurate. The statute does require that one who runs for office must have been registered for two years, but that actually results in far more than a two-year delay in seeking office.
"(Ms. Johns) will have had to wait some 45 months before she can be elected to office should the voters wish to choose her as their state representative, a substantial burden on her right to run for office and on the right of voters to vote for her."