A.
Voters
1.
Injury in Fact
Individual Plaintiffs have adequately demonstrated that they suffered an
injury-in-fact. “[A] person’s right to vote is ‘individual and personal in nature.’”52
Accordingly, the denial of a person’s right to vote is typically always sufficiently
concrete and particularized to establish a cognizable injury.53 This is true
regardless of whether such a harm is widely shared.54 So long as an injury is
concrete, courts will find that an injury in fact exists despite the fact that such harm
is felt by many.55
This is precisely the situation presented here. Individual Plaintiffs have
adequately pled that their votes were denied. As discussed above, the denial of a
vote is a highly personal and concrete injury. That Individual Plaintiffs had their
ballots cancelled and thus invalidated is sufficiently personal to establish an injury
in fact. It is of no matter that many persons across the state might also have had
their votes invalidated due to their county’s failure to implement a curing
52
53
54
55
Gill v. Whitford, 138 S. Ct. 1916, 1929 (2018) (quoting Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 561
(1964)).
See Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U.S. 339, 349 (1960) (Whittaker, J.) (noting the distinction
between injuries caused by outright denial of the right to vote versus those caused by
reducing the weight or power of an individual’s vote). The Court notes that much of
standing doctrine as it relates to voting rights arises from gerrymandering or vote-dilution
cases, which often involve relatively abstract harms. See, e.g., Gill, 138 S. Ct.; Gaffney v.
Cummings, 412 U.S. 735 (1973); Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964)).
See Federal Elections Comm’n v. Akins, 524 U.S. 11, 24 (1998) (citing Public Citizen v. U.S.
Dep’t of Justice, 491 U.S. 440, 449-50 (1989)).
See id. (“[W]here a harm is concrete, though widely shared, the [United States Supreme]
Court has found ‘injury in fact.’”) (quoting Public Citizen, 491 U.S. at 449-50).
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