The full Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday vacated a lower court’s preliminary injunction and cleared the way for Arizona to enforce two key 2022 election integrity provisions that left-wing activist groups had blocked for years.
The en banc ruling in Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans v. Mayes hands a decisive defeat to the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans, Voto Latino, and Priorities USA, the usual cast of Democrat-aligned voter registration outfits that sued to stop common-sense reforms aimed at preventing double voting and out-of-state voting schemes.
These groups claimed Arizona’s “Cancellation Provision” and “Felony Provision” somehow interfered with their “core” activities of registering and mobilizing voters. The full court wasn’t buying it.
Arizona’s Senate Bill 1260, passed in 2022, strengthened the state’s ability to keep voter rolls accurate:
- The Cancellation Provision requires a county recorder to cancel a voter’s registration in that county once the recorder receives confirmation (or confirms credible information) that the person has registered to vote in another Arizona county. This is basic list maintenance to stop people from remaining registered — and potentially voting — in multiple counties.
- The Felony Provision makes it a crime to knowingly provide a “mechanism for voting” to someone who is registered to vote in another state. The statute gives the example of forwarding an early ballot.
Left-wing groups sued, claiming these measures would force them to divert resources and chill their registration drives. A district court judge obliged them with a preliminary injunction. A three-judge panel later vacated that injunction, but the full court took the case en banc.
The majority opinion, written by Judge Anthony D. Johnstone, delivers a clear message rooted in the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine: organizations cannot manufacture Article III standing simply by spending money to oppose a law they dislike or by claiming their “mission” is frustrated.
Under Hippocratic Medicine, an organizational plaintiff must show the challenged law “directly affect[s] and interfere[s] with [its] core business activities.” Mere diversion of resources to educate people about a law or to advocate against it is not enough.
Hellbound and Down 