A citizens advocacy group has standing to challenge California’s controversial voting laws and regulations in federal court, according to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
“This lawsuit is monumental because it is the first to challenge the constitutionality of California’s election laws and procedures, and we are the first to get past standing,” Mariah Gondeiro, lead attorney with Advocates for Faith and Freedom, said in a statement following the decision.
“If we win, California will be required to enforce secure and uniform vote casting and vote counting procedures,” Gondeiro said.
“For over a decade, Election Integrity Project®California has researched and documented every aspect of California’s election process and identified how these laws transformed an Election Day into a 60-day election season fraught with easy to manipulate procedures,” EIPCa’s President, Linda Paine, said in the statement.
“We are now seeing California Style laws in states across the country creating the same problems that have been witnessed and documented by EIPCa-trained observers in California for years,” Paine said.
The Ninth Circuit remanded the case to the U.S. District Court for Central California, which had previously ruled that EIPCa lacked standing.
In its ruling, the Ninth Circuit said EIPCa’s mission is to “‘ensure that every lawfully cast vote is accurately counted’ and to use the observations of its volunteers to ‘advocate for greater election integrity,’ and that California’s regulations have frustrated its mission by ‘lead[ing] to pervasive irregularities in the election process that threaten to disenfranchise California voters.’”
The court noted that, according to the EIPCa complaint, “California has enacted legislation requiring every active registered voter in California to receive a vote-by-mail ballot, and the state has not developed procedures to ensure that only eligible voters will receive such ballots in the future.
“The complaint further alleges that California’s Secretary of State promulgated regulations that prevent meaningful standards from being applied to verify signatures on vote-by-mail ballots.
“According to the complaint, these inadequate processes give rise to ’massive opportunities for both error and fraud,‘ and ’[b]ecause the same or substantially similar laws, regulations, orders and practices are governing and will govern upcoming elections, the same situation will repeat' in future elections.”
With the case being sent back to the District Court, both sides will now begin preparing for the discovery phase of the litigation. Named in its suit by EIPCa as defendants are California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, Attorney General Rob Bonta, Secretary of State Shirley Weber and 13 county registrars.
The ruling that EIPCa has standing to challenge California’s election laws comes as hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots cast in the Nov. 8 midterm election are yet to be counted, with a result that two races for congressional seats remain undecided.
Among the procedures EIPCa challenges is California’s sending of mail-in ballots to every registered voter in the state prior to an election. The state also allows vote harvesting, a process under which voters can fill out their ballot, then give it to an individual who promises to cast the ballot.
“The State and County Appellees claim Appellants lack standing because their allegations amount to generalized, speculative claims of vote fraud. They even impugn Appellants’ motives for bringing this case. Appellants bring this case to ensure the integrity of future elections, and ensuring all votes are counted equally protects democracy, for ‘(f)ree and honest elections are the very foundation of our republican form of government.’”
