This is an excellent question, and it's something that I've thought about some over the last couple of months.

Honestly, I think the answer is that the rationales for these rulings are not likely to unreasonably harm meritorious progressive OR conservative challenges.

The first thing to keep in mind is that, by design, challenges to the outcomes of elections are supposed to be heard by state courts, through the process set out in state law.

That happened this year, and the majority of those challenges were heard on the merits.
The couple of cases where laches determined the outcome of state election challenges were ones where it was pretty clear that the challenges were brought in bad faith - where ballots cast in good faith in reliance on laws that had been in force for some time were challenged.
The PA challenge to Act 77 is one example. The challengers, some of whom had voted for passage of the bill, didn't make use of the initial, direct-to-PA-SCt challenge built into the law or sue pre-election; they waited until post-election.
The WI case is another. That one had a challenge to ballots cast using a form that had been in use for a literal decade.

Those are cases where laches is clear - particularly the prejudice element.
The federal cases were the ones with standing issues. The federal courts are supposed to have a limited role in state elections. That role is primarily in protecting the right to vote, and as many judges noted this year, these post-election cases weren't about the right to vote.
They were, instead, challenges based on the premise that "my vote should count, that other person's shouldn't." Finding a lack of individual voter standing for a challenge to thousands of other voters is very much in line with existing law.
The Electors Clause cases made new standing law, but that's a relatively novel theory that's never been the basis for such aggressive litigation.

The theory Trump was advancing was that any deviation from state election law could be litigated in federal courts.
I can understand why having that as an option would be something welcomed by some on the left, but I'm conservative enough (at least when it comes to federal jurisprudence) to think that would be a bad thing.
I don't think the federal courts should be ruling de novo on whether (eg) it violates Pennsylvania law to make observers stand 10 feet from tables instead of 6 feet, or on whether it violates Georgia law to make an election clerk get a second opinion on a signature question.
Meanwhile, there was considerable pre-election litigation (on many of the same questions) where there weren't issues because the right parties brought cases in the right court at the right time.
So I'm pretty much OK with the way the courts - especially federal - handled the post-election litigation this cycle.

More from Mike Dunford

THREAD:
Good afternoon, followers of frivolous election litigation. There's a last-minute entry in the competition for dumbest pre-inauguration lawsuit - a totally loony effort to apparently leave the entire USA without a government.

We'll start with the complaint in a minute.

But first, I want to give you a quick explanation for why I'm going to keep talking about these cases even after the inauguration.

They're part of an ongoing effort - one that's not well-coordinated but is widespread - to discredit our fundamental system of government.

It's a direct descendent, in more ways than one, of birtherism. And here's the thing about birtherism. It might have been a joke to a lot of people, but it was extremely pernicious. It obviously validated the racist "not good enough to be President" crowd. But that wasn't all.

Don't get me wrong, that was bad enough. Validating racism helped put the kind of shitbird who would tweet this from an official government account into power. But it didn't stop


(Also, if you agree with Pompeo about multiculturalism - the legendary melting pot - not being what this country is all about, you need to stop following me now. And maybe go somewhere and think about your life choices and what made you such a tool.)
I went over the dismissal on my stream, but a few thoughts on where things are at:

1: The Notice of Appeal doesn't shock me; I figured Louie would be this dumb.
2: As was the case with the case at the District Court, it doesn't really matter how vigorously Pence defends this.


3: The lack of standing is so spectacularly, glaringly obvious that it doesn't really matter whether Pence raised certain arguments; they will get noticed by the court.
4: That's because federal courts have an independent duty to ensure they have jurisdiction.

5: Standing is a jurisdictional requirement; no standing means no case.
6: The rules for standing are clear and nothing in the opinion dismissing the case was the least bit controversial in any universe except the alternate one inhabited by Louie and the Arizonan cosplayers.

7: "But it's the 5th Circuit" will be raised both by Trumpistians and those who are exceptionally nervous. There is exactly as much reason to be concerned about the 5th as there was the trial court: ie none at all.

So - my expectations:
Given the timeline, I suspect that Louie will be granted an expedited appeal and will lose on an expedited basis. I also expect that he will appeal to SCOTUS and the appeal there will not be expedited.

More from Government

Typically excellent piece from @dsquareddigest The exponential insight is especially neat. Think of it a little like fishing...today you can’t export oysters to the EU (because you simply aren’t allowed to), tomorrow you don’t have a fish exporting business (to the EU).


The extremely small minority of people who known anything about this who think that Brexit will be good for the City make a number of arguments which I shall address in turn...

1. They need us more than we need them. This is a variant of the German carmakers argument. And we know how that went...Business will follow the profit opportunity and if that has moved then so will the business...

And what do we mean by us / we. We’re not talking about massed ranks of Euro investing / trading etc blue blooded British institutions.

Au contraire. We’re talking about the London based subs of US, Asian and indeed European capital markets players...As soon as they think the profit opportunity has moved then so will they...it’s a market innit...

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