The Election Integrity Project (EIP) presented oral arguments to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last month with the hope that the federal appeals court will reverse the Central District of California’s June 2021 dismissal.
EIP and a coalition of GOP congressional candidates sued various county election officials and Gov. Gavin Newsom in the Central District of California on Jan. 4, 2021.
They allege in their lawsuit that California’s voting practices are unconstitutional but instead of granting an order requiring state officials to decertify the November 2020 election results and allowing an inspection of all voting machines by subject matter experts, U.S. District Judge André Birotte Jr. dismissed the complaint.
“Plaintiffs’ allegations amount to an incremental undermining of confidence in the election results, past, and future,” Birotte wrote in his June 15 decision. “Such a generalized grievance is insufficient for standing. Ultimately, and as our sister courts have found, a vote cast by fraud, mailed in by the wrong person, or otherwise compromised during the elections process has an impact on the final tally and thus on the proportional effect of every vote, but no single voter is specifically disadvantaged.”
EIP argued their appeal of Birotte's opinion on Sept. 23 to a panel of three judges that included Sandra Ikuta, Danielle Forrest, and Holly Thomas.
While the state referenced Bush v Gore as a standard for vote dilution during oral arguments, EIP asserted that vote dilution includes the possibility of vote cancellation and vote negation.
“The Appellees theory of vote dilution is very myopic,” said attorney Mariah Gondeiro, who represents EIP. “They seem to think that a vote dilution occurs only where votes are weighted differently.”
In Bush v Gore, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the state of Florida had violated the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment in ordering only a partial recount of the 2000 presidential elections.
“There were no signed affidavits signed under penalty of perjury, documenting irregularities in Bush v Gore,” Gondeiro told the justices. “What the court had in front of them was that there was a lack of uniform practices that would inevitably lead to a disparate treatment of voters.”
As previously reported in the Southern California Record, EIP submitted 600 affidavits documenting election irregularities.
“Six-hundred affidavits are not speculative,” Gondeiro added. “Those affidavits are signed under penalty of perjury. The statement of facts of the complaint alleges that the Appellees were applying different time periods for when they were verifying signatures and they applied different procedures for adjudication and remaking of ballots.”
When the panel questioned whether EIP even had the standing to file the complaint, Gondeiro noted that vote-by-mail expansion and relaxed signature verification requirements harmed the nonprofit.
“The organization had to expend more resources on voter observation in documenting voting irregularities than they would have, and they spent more money on those issues than in prior elections,” she said.