## Facts

- Kentucky enacted Ky. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 81A.430 in 1980, permitting one city to designate a contiguous part of another city for annexation.
- If the annexation was contested, the statute required an election in which only residents of the proposed annexation area could vote; a majority of that area’s voters decided the outcome.
- Ft. Wright and Crescent Springs initiated annexation proceedings to take portions of the City of Covington under the statute.
- Covington residents outside the annexation areas (including the plaintiffs) were excluded from the annexation elections, though they claimed fiscal and civic impacts from the loss of territory.
- Plaintiffs sued the Kenton County Court Clerk under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief and arguing the selective franchise violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
- The court denied a preliminary injunction; the elections proceeded and annexation-area voters approved annexation into Ft. Wright and Crescent Springs.
- Plaintiffs continued the constitutional challenge on the merits, seeking to invalidate the statute and the resulting annexations.

## Issues

1. Whether limiting the annexation vote to residents of the annexation area, while excluding other residents of the affected city, violates the Equal Protection Clause.
2. Whether, when altering municipal boundaries, a state must enfranchise all affected municipal residents or may constitutionally define a narrower electorate.

## Decision

- The court upheld KRS 81A.430 against the equal protection challenge.
- The court held the statute’s selective franchise was constitutionally permissible because the state has broad authority to create and modify municipalities and their boundaries.
- The court applied rational-basis review, finding no suspect classification and no federal constitutional requirement that all arguably affected residents vote on boundary changes.
- The court concluded the legislature could rationally limit the electorate to those residing in the territory whose municipal affiliation would change.
- The court denied declaratory and injunctive relief, leaving the annexation election results in place.

## Legal Principles

- States have wide latitude to structure, alter, and define municipal corporations and their boundaries as political subdivisions of the state.
- The Equal Protection Clause does not require that every governmental decision with community-wide consequences be decided by a vote, nor that all persons affected by a boundary change be enfranchised on that question.
- Where a state defines the electorate for a boundary-change mechanism and no suspect class is implicated, rational-basis review applies.
- A selective franchise in a local election is valid if the state’s classification is rationally related to a legitimate governmental objective, including concentrating the decision on those most directly affected and providing an administrable process for resolving annexation disputes.

## Conclusion

The court sustained Kentucky’s annexation procedure that confined the annexation vote to residents of the affected territory, holding that the state’s choice of electorate for municipal boundary changes satisfied equal protection under rational-basis review and that the completed annexations remained valid.


Moorman v. Wood, 504 F. Supp. 467 (E.D. Ky. 1980)