## Facts

- Ohio’s Secretary of State implemented procedures to comply with the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) § 303 requirement that the statewide voter-registration database be matched against motor vehicle (and related) records to verify application information.
- The Ohio Republican Party alleged the Secretary stopped providing county election boards with lists of voter-registration entries that did not match those other databases.
- The plaintiffs claimed HAVA required transmission of mismatch information to county officials and sought injunctive relief shortly before the 2008 general election.

## Issues

1. Whether private litigants were sufficiently likely to show that Congress authorized a federal cause of action to enforce HAVA § 303 against a state election official, such that a temporary restraining order was proper.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court granted the Secretary’s application for a stay and vacated the district court’s temporary restraining order.
- The Court held respondents were not sufficiently likely to prevail on whether Congress authorized private enforcement of HAVA § 303 to justify issuance of a TRO.
- The Court expressed no opinion on whether Ohio was otherwise properly implementing HAVA.

## Legal Principles

- A federal court should not grant emergency injunctive relief when the plaintiff is not sufficiently likely to succeed on a threshold question that Congress authorized the requested private enforcement.
- Federal statutes are not presumed to create privately enforceable rights or implied private causes of action; congressional intent to authorize private enforcement must be clearly shown (citing Gonzaga Univ. v. Doe and Alexander v. Sandoval).
- In election-administration disputes close to an election, the propriety of emergency relief turns heavily on likelihood of success and the legitimacy of the asserted enforcement mechanism.

## Conclusion

The Court vacated the TRO because the private-party plaintiffs did not demonstrate a sufficient likelihood that HAVA § 303 is privately enforceable in federal court, leaving unresolved the merits of Ohio’s substantive compliance with HAVA.


Brunner v. Ohio Republican Party, 555 U.S. 5 (2008)