The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond. (Photo by Ned Oliver/Virginia Mercury)
A federal appeals court has rejected a lawsuit by a pair of election integrity groups that claimed Maryland’s elections are fatally flawed, saying the groups failed to show that they suffered any injury that would give them standing to sue.
The ruling Tuesday by a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is the latest development in a case filed last spring by Maryland Election Integrity LLC and United Sovereign Americans, a Missouri-based group. They had claimed widespread problems with the state’s voter registration and with its operation of the 2020 and 2022 elections that they said were so severe it merited putting the state’s presidential primary election on hold.
U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher dismissed the suit in May, a week before the primary, saying that the groups had not shown that any injuries to their voting rights were likely and that they did not, thus, have standing to sue.
That decision was upheld this week by the appeals court panel, which agreed with Gallagher that the plaintiffs had failed to show the likelihood of injuries that would let them press a claim. The threats outlined by the groups in one instance were “‘conjectural [and] hypothetical’ not ‘actual or imminent,’” wrote Circuit Judge James Andrew Wynn in the opinion for the appellate court panel.
“Plaintiffs have failed to demonstrate that any of their members would have standing to sue in their own right, and therefore cannot establish standing to sue on behalf of those members,” Wynn wrote.
The latest ruling was hailed by Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, who called it “a victory for all Maryland voters.”
“I am proud of our Office’s role in ensuring that special interest groups cannot use arguments based on misinformation to disenfranchise Marylanders, and I am grateful that the Fourth Circuit has safeguarded our courtrooms against attempts to unjustifiably hinder free and fair elections, the cornerstone of our democracy,” Brown said in a prepared statement.
In their original complaint, the groups made a litany of charges, including claims that their “meticulous analysis” uncovered almost 80,ooo voter registrations that may have been duplicates” and another 40,000 with “a questionable registration date.”
Their complaint also claimed voting system error rates that were “exponentially above the maximum allowable error rates” under state and federal law. Those errors harmed legitimate voters whose ballots might be miscast or whose votes might be diluted by ballots that should have been rejected, they said. The groups also complained that the Maryland State Board of Elections failed to turn over election reports they had requested under the Maryland Public Information Act.
But Gallagher dismissed the suit, saying the groups had not demonstrated that they suffered any specific harm, but merely presented “simply generalized grievances applicable to the community as a whole. Courts routinely find such grievances insufficient to demonstrate standing to sue.”
The appeals court said she got it right.
“Plaintiffs appeal the district court’s holding that they lack representational standing to assert claims on behalf of individual members,” Wynn wrote. “Because plaintiffs do not allege concrete, particularized, or certainly impending injuries, we affirm.”