U.S. District Court Judge Dominic Lanza dismissed a lawsuit challenging over a million ineligible voters on Arizona’s voter rolls, asserting that the plaintiffs had no standing. Arizona Republican Party Chair Gina Swoboda (pictured above, right), Arizona Free Enterprise Club President Scot Mussi (pictured above, 2nd left), and Republican businessman Steven Gaynor (pictured above, 2nd right) filed the lawsuit against Secretary of State Adrian Fontes earlier this year.
Legal commentator Robert Barnes said rejecting lawsuits based on standing is a legal practice that should not exist in the law. “[I]n some of the worst government abuses over the last century, the main doctrine cited for judicial abdication is standing,” he said, citing a law review articleat Pepperdine School of Law. “The meaning of standing keeps involving over the decades since with the courts restricting the definition of injury and rewriting the meaning of causation to exclude most Constitutional injuries from judicial remedy wherever and whenever it politically pleased the courts to do so. As scholars concede: the standing doctrine is ‘so malleable’ that courts ‘routinely manipulate’ it depending on where a judge ‘wishes’ to reach the merits. The wild inconsistency and contradictions in standing doctrine reveal it for it really is: a Pontius Pilate pretext to wash their hands of the dirty deeds of government.”
The lawsuit from Republican plaintiffs alleged that Fontes violated the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) by not cleaning the voter rolls, allowing up to 1.27 million voters who were deceased or moved out of the state to remain registered to vote. The government sent 52,387 voter registration confirmation notices to voters, but only 131,682 voters were removed in response. “[T]here are no reported voter responses or removals by the Secretary accounting for the status of the remaining 620,000 notice letters,” the lawsuit said. Additionally, four counties — Apache, La Paz, Navajo, and Santa Cruz — have more registered voters than total voting age citizens, the suit said.
In his 19-page order issued on Thursday, Lanza (pictured above, left) said, “Although the NVRA creates a private right of action for any person ‘aggrieved’ by a statutory violation, 52 U.S.C. § 20510(b)(2), Plaintiffs still must allege that the challenged conduct has caused them to suffer a concrete and particularized injury that is actual and imminent, not conjectural or hypothetical.” Lanza claimed that because the plaintiffs only speculated that their votes were harmed, that it did not rise to the level of an injury.
His reasoning stands in contrast to other election-related lawsuits where judges ruled there was standing. In Favorito v. Wan, the Court of Appeals of Georgia found that election integrity investigator Garland Favorito of VoterGA and others had standing to sue the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections alleging vote dilution because they were citizens in Fulton County.
