RUTLAND — Federal district court Judge Geoffrey Crawford has dismissed a suit seeking to alter the state’s plan to send mail-in ballots to all registered voters beginning Friday.
Five individuals, including Rep. Brian Smith, R-Derby, argued that mailing a ballot to every registered voter means some ballots will go to the wrong address or be mailed to someone who is deceased. This will present an opportunity for unlawful voting, they argued. Those unlawful votes would harm them by diluting the impact of their own, legal, votes, they maintained.
In oral arguments held Tuesday, the plaintiffs attorney also argued the plaintiffs may be denied their right to vote if they don’t receive a ballot in the mail and then fail to take the initiative to get a ballot themselves or go to the polling place on Election Day. Crawford dismissed their argument, stating: “As this is not a class action, the court considers the experience of the individual plaintiffs themselves. These are sophisticated voters who have gone to considerable lengths to obtain counsel skilled in election law and to file a lawsuit in federal court. Of all people likely to be confused about how to vote, these five plaintiffs must be last on the list.”
As for the argument that their votes will be diluted by illegal voting, Crawford found that the plaintiffs do not have standing to bring suit.
The principal of standing is used to narrow the number of cases brought before the federal courts to ones in which there is a specific and direct injury or “injury in fact,” for which the defendant is responsible and for which the court may be able to provide some redress, in whole or in part. A generalized injury is not sufficient for standing, nor is a hypothetical one.
“Cases in which plaintiffs assert ‘generalized grievances’ of unlawful government action are commonly dismissed on standing grounds,” Crawford wrote.
In his decision, Crawford cited the ruling in Liberian Community Association of Connecticut, which states: “Carried to its logical end [litigation without direct injury] would have the federal courts as virtually continuing monitors of the wisdom and soundness of Executive action; such a role is appropriate to the Congress acting through its committees or the ‘power of the purse,’ it is not the role of the judiciary absent actual present or immediately threatened injury resulting from unlawful government action.”
Because his decision rests on standing, Crawford did not evaluate the likelihood of the plaintiffs’ claims of unlawful voting actually transpiring.
Instead, he found that if an illegal vote is cast, and that casting dilutes the impact of lawful votes, the injury suffered is a generalized one, experienced in equal measure by all voters. “A vote cast by fraud or mailed in by the wrong person through mistake has a mathematical impact on the final tally and thus on the proportional impact of every vote, but no single voter is specifically disadvantaged,” Crawford wrote.
“Plaintiffs have failed to show the ‘injury in fact’ necessary to have standing,” Crawford concluded, comparing the case to one recently rejected on similar grounds by the Vermont Supreme Court.
That case, filed by perennial Republican candidate for numerous statewide offices, H. Brooke Paige, was also dismissed with the VSC ruling Paige’s claim “consisted of theoretical harms to the election process rather than threats of actual injury being caused to a protected legal interest.”
