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 article at 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.
The court cited a recent ruling by the Georgia Supreme Court, which stated that an “injury need not always be individualized; sometimes it can be a generalized grievance shared by community members, especially other residents, taxpayers, voters, or citizens. …
Unlike Lanza, the court found that it wasn’t necessary to prove an injury in order to have standing, it was merely necessary to show that the government broke the law. “Georgia has long recognized that members of a community, whether as citizens, residents, taxpayers, or voters, may be injured when their local government fails to follow the law,” the court said.
Barnes, who is known for coining this phrase about judges dismissing election lawsuits since 2020, “Not ripe in spring, no standing by summer, Laches by fall, and moot by winter,” explained how the courts attempt to justify rejecting lawsuits based on standing. “One aspect of this pernicious politicized doctrine is to pretend some rights are owed to a general ‘public’ but never to a single person, as if the ‘crowd’ exists as some separate subject. The court’s real goal is political — remove the ability of any person to vindicate Constitutional rights unless an approved official of the same government violating our rights accedes and approves.”
He explained how standing is a recent legal invention that added a new heightened requirement of injury. “At the time of our founding, private individuals could routinely enforce rights and liberties under law or equity without a special injury individually separate from the community at large and could even bring suit without any adversarial defendant party. … To evade this stricture, the courts reconstructed crimes to be injuries against the state rather than injuries against people, revealing the philosophically Statist approach undergirding the entire history of Standing as a doctrine.”
The plaintiffs are expected to appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Judge Dominic Lanza,” by Judge Dominic Lanza; “Arizona Republican Party Chair Gina Swoboda” by Gina Swoboda; “Arizona Free Enterprise Club President Scot Mussi” by Arizona Free Enterprise Club; and “Steven Gaynor” is by Steven Gaynor.
