Opinion ID: 4562703
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Voters Failed to Prove an Injury.

Text: Two of the three voters never testified at trial or in a deposition. The record contains no evidence about any injuries those two individuals suffered in the past or may suffer in the future. Indeed, we do not even know whether they plan to vote in future Florida elections. When confronted with this lack of evidence, the district court reasoned that an “impact on the right to vote” is “common to all election laws,” so the voters must have standing. But the Supreme Court has made clear that “a person’s right to vote is individual and personal in nature,” so “voters who allege facts showing disadvantage to themselves as individuals have standing to sue.” Gill v. Whitford, 138 S. Ct. 1916, 1929 (2018) (internal quotation marks omitted). And of course, “[t]he facts necessary to establish standing . . . must not only be alleged at the pleading stage, but also proved at trial.” Id. at 1931. Because they failed to offer 13 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 14 of 152 any evidence at trial showing disadvantage to themselves as individuals, these two voters failed to prove an injury. The only voter who offered any evidence at trial was Nancy Jacobson. Jacobson testified that she “always vote[s],” that she “go[es] out of [her] way to vote in every election,” and that she consistently votes for Democratic candidates. But Jacobson failed to identify any difficulty in voting for her preferred candidate or otherwise participating in the political process. Although her brief is less than clear on this point, Jacobson appears to identify two threatened injuries from the ballot statute. The first is that some unidentified Democratic candidates for whom she will vote in future elections will lose those elections because of the primacy effect. The second injury is that— regardless of the outcome of any election—the ballot statute “dilutes” the votes of Democrats relative to Republicans by allocating the windfall vote entirely to Republican candidates. We reject both theories of injury. To the extent Jacobson contends that she will be injured if a Democratic candidate for whom she votes loses an election or is at increased risk of losing, we disagree. A candidate’s electoral loss does not, by itself, injure those who voted for the candidate. Voters have no judicially enforceable interest in the outcome of an election. See Raines v. Byrd, 521 U.S. 811, 819, 824, 830 (1997). Instead, they 14 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 15 of 152 have an interest in their ability to vote and in their vote being given the same weight as any other. Raines, which involved the standing of legislators to challenge the constitutionality of the Line Item Veto Act, is instructive. Id. at 814, 816. Several legislators who voted against the Act sued to challenge it. Id. at 814. The Supreme Court explained that passage of the Act did not injure the legislators who voted against it because “their votes were given full effect,” and the disappointed legislators “simply lost that vote.” Id. at 824. The Court made clear that legislators have standing to challenge the defeat or enactment of legislation only if the outcome of the vote changed because their votes were “nullified”—that is, not counted at all. Id. at 823 & n.6. Jacobson does not argue that the ballot statute nullifies her vote. Instead, her complaint is that less careful voters will vote for Republican candidates solely because they appear first on the ballot, which might cause her preferred candidates to lose. Like the legislators in Raines, the first harm she identifies is an unfavorable electoral outcome, wholly apart from any allegation of vote dilution or nullification. Although the voting rights of legislators and citizens are not identical, see Nev. Comm’n on Ethics v. Carrigan, 564 U.S. 117, 126 (2011), we conclude that absent any evidence of vote dilution or nullification, a citizen is not injured by the simple fact that a candidate for whom she votes loses or stands to lose an election. 15 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 16 of 152 And two of our sister circuits agree. See Berg v. Obama, 586 F.3d 234, 240 (3d Cir. 2009) (“Berg’s wish that the Democratic primary voters had chosen a different presidential candidate . . . do[es] not state a legal harm.”); Becker v. Fed. Election Comm’n, 230 F.3d 381, 390 (1st Cir. 2000) (holding that a candidate’s decreased “chance of being elected” was “hardly a restriction on voters’ rights and by itself [was] not a legally cognizable injury sufficient for standing”). Jacobson’s first alleged injury is legally insufficient to establish Article III standing. Insofar as Jacobson argues that the ballot statute will injure her by diluting her vote relative to the votes of Republicans, she failed to prove any such injury. Her theory of vote dilution appears to be that, because of Florida’s ballot order and the primacy effect, it takes a greater number of careful Democratic voters than careful Republican voters to elect their preferred candidates. The reason for this disparity is that some less careful voters will select Republican candidates solely because they happen to appear first on the ballot, thereby diluting the votes of careful Democratic voters. Even assuming that this kind of “vote dilution” counts as an Article III injury, the evidence Jacobson offered is insufficient to prove it. In Gill, the Supreme Court addressed whether voters had standing to challenge a partisan gerrymander based on the dilution of their votes. 138 S. Ct. at 1929–31. Partisan gerrymandering operates by placing voters of one party “in legislative districts deliberately designed to ‘waste’ their votes in elections where 16 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 17 of 152 their chosen candidates will win in landslides (packing) or are destined to lose by closer margins (cracking).” Id. at 1930. The voters’ theory of injury was that the partisan gerrymander caused their votes to “carry less weight” than they would “in another, hypothetical district” that had not been packed or cracked. Id. at 1931. But instead of offering evidence that they lived in a packed or cracked district, which could have shown “disadvantage to themselves as individuals,” id. at 1930 (internal quotation marks omitted), the voters rested their case on a “theory of statewide injury to Wisconsin Democrats,” id. at 1932. To prove partisan vote dilution, the voters in Gill relied on an “average measure” of “partisan asymmetry” that compared the “statewide sum of one party’s wasted votes” to “the statewide sum of the other party’s wasted votes.” Id. at 1933. The Supreme Court held that this average measure of the partisan effects of a gerrymander was insufficient to establish the voters’ standing because it did not “address the effect that a gerrymander has on the votes of particular citizens.” Id. It instead “measure[d] something else entirely: the effect that a gerrymander has on the fortunes of political parties.” Id. Jacobson similarly relies on a statewide average measure of the primacy effect in Florida elections to prove the injury of partisan vote dilution. Her experts testified, and the district court found, that candidates who appear first on the ballot in Florida receive an average primacy effect vote of about five percent. But the 17 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 18 of 152 experts acknowledged that this average measure tells us nothing about the existence or size of the primacy effect in any given election. Dr. Krosnick agreed that his analysis did not “mean that every Republican candidate receive[s] a [five] percent advantage by being listed first.” As he explained, the primacy effect will be larger in some races and smaller in others. Indeed, because Jacobson relies solely on an average measure of the primacy effect, we cannot know how often the primacy effect is zero and how often it is much greater than five percent. Any estimates we might make about the variance in the primacy effect across races would be pure speculation. As in Gill, the average measure of partisan advantage on which Jacobson relies is insufficient to prove that her individual vote will be diluted. “We need not doubt [Jacobson’s] math” to reach this conclusion. Id. The reason her calculations cannot establish standing is that they “are an average measure.” Id. “They do not address the effect” that ballot order and the primacy effect have “on the votes of particular citizens” in any given election. Id. (emphasis added). Instead, like the average measures at issue in Gill, Jacobson’s calculations “measure something else entirely: the effect that [ballot order and the primacy effect have] on the fortunes of political parties” across many elections. Id. And complaints about that effect are based on nothing more than “generalized partisan preferences,” which federal courts are “not responsible for vindicating.” Id. 18 Case: 19-14552 Date Filed: 09/03/2020 Page: 19 of 152 Much like the average measure of wasted votes in Gill, the average measure of the primacy effect treats all elections “as indistinguishable, even though their individual situations are quite different.” Id. In low-information races between Democrats and Republicans, the primacy effect may be quite pronounced. But in an especially competitive, high-information race, the primacy effect may be negligible or nonexistent. Likewise, some races in noncompetitive districts may have no Republican candidates on the ballot at all and, hence, no primacy effect. An average measure of the primacy effect across all elections cannot tell us whether ballot order has diluted or will dilute Jacobson’s or any other citizen’s vote in any particular election. See id. (explaining that statewide average measures of partisan advantage were incapable of distinguishing between the effects of a gerrymander on one citizen as opposed to another). Jacobson and the other voters failed to prove that they have suffered or will suffer partisan vote dilution in any particular election. As in Gill, this lawsuit presents a dispute “about group political interests, not individual legal rights.” Id. The “generalized partisan preferences” on which the voters rely cannot provide an injury in fact sufficient for Article III standing. Id.