Should voters have to abide by a dress code?

The idea seems absurd. Yet when Andrew Cilek showed up to cast his ballot in Hennepin County, Minnesota, in 2010, he was asked to remove or cover up a Tea Party shirt and a button reading "Please ID Me."

Cilek eventually was allowed to vote without removing the offending shirt and button. But recently his lawyer asked the Supreme Court to strike down the state law that brought his apparel under the scrutiny of election officials. It prohibits the wearing of a "political badge, political button, or other political insignia" at a polling place on election day.

The court should do so because the law is a violation of the First Amendment; the only issue is how broad the ruling should be.

The recent oral argument validated the main contention raised by Cilek and the Minnesota Voters Alliance: that the law is unconstitutionally over-broad because it suppresses speech far beyond advocacy for a party or candidate. Even worse, the state seems to have arbitrary standards for deciding which political messages fall on the permissible side of the line.

In a revealing exchange with Justice Samuel A. Alito, Daniel Rogan, the lawyer defending the law, suggested that a shirt bearing the slogan "Parkland Strong" (a reference to the site of the recent Florida school shooting) would be permissible, but not a shirt showing the logo of the National Rifle Association. Likewise, Rogan said, a shirt displaying the text of the First Amendment would be acceptable, but one displaying the text of the 2nd Amendment "could be viewed as political."

Justice Neil Gorsuch worried that the state's approach "would forbid people from wearing certain portions of the Bill of Rights into a polling place but not other portions of the Bill of Rights." That worries us too. What constitutes an unacceptably political message on a piece of clothing is inherently a subjective judgment that government officials ought not to be making.

Minnesota goes further than many other states in regulating expression at polling places. California, for example, bans only shirts with messages that engage in "electioneering" -- defined as "information that advocates for or against any candidate or measure on the ballot."

In 1992 the Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law that prohibited the solicitation of votes or the display or distribution of campaign materials within 100 feet of a polling place. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote that the burden the law imposed on free speech was justified by the compelling interest of preventing voter intimidation and election fraud. The court could strike down Minnesota's broad law without disturbing that decision.

But maintaining what Justice Elena Kagan sarcastically called a "church-like" atmosphere at polling place shouldn't be the principal priority of election officials. Certainly it isn't a reason to suppress silent, nondisruptive expression.

Ideally the court will rule broadly in this case. But at a minimum it must strike down Minnesota's law. Workers at polling places shouldn't be critiquing either the fashion choices or the opinions of voters.

— This editorial first appeared in the Los Angeles Times.