A Georgia judge dismissed a lawsuit by Georgia voters alleging voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, finding that the plaintiffs did not suffer a particularized injury for the courts to adjudicate.
On Wednesday, Georgia Superior Court Judge Brian Amero dismissed the lawsuit against individual members of the Fulton County elections board, preventing the plaintiffs from reviewing physical copies of the county’s 147,000 absentee ballots that were cast in the 2020 election.
Despite the court finding Fulton County in violation of an Open Records Request and evidence showing “the scanned images of one ballot which appeared to have been counted twice” in earlier proceedings, the case was dismissed.
Fulton County election workers examine ballots while vote counting, at State Farm Arena on November 5, 2020, in Atlanta, Georgia. (Tami Chappell/AFP via Getty Images)
This case was not decided on the merits. Instead, Judge Amero relied on the jurisdictional standing doctrine, which requires the plaintiffs to suffer a “concrete and particularized” and “actual or imminent” injury that is connected to the causal conduct, with a likelihood that a court will redress the damage to be heard before the court.
“Petitioners allege their votes have been diluted due to the ‘substantial likelihood’ that fraudulent ballots were introduced during ballot processing for the General Election,” Amero writes. “regardless of the veracity of these allegations, the Court finds Petitioners have still failed to allege particularized injury.”
Judge Amero relied on the Eleventh Circuit decision in attorney Lin Wood’s 2020 voter fraud lawsuit.
Attorney Lin Wood, a member of President Donald Trump’s legal team, speaks during a rally on December 2, 2020, in Alpharetta, Georgia. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)
Amero writes:
Petitioners’ allegations are, in sum, that their state equal protection and due process rights were violated because their votes, and the votes of other Georgia voters, were diluted as result of the inclusion of fraudulent ballots that were counted because Respondents negligently oversaw the ballot processing for the General Election.
The 11th Circuit in Wood found substantially similar allegations of voter dilution insufficient to confer standing.
Amero further writes that “Vote dilution as a result of allegedly unlawfully processed ballots is ‘a paradigmatic generalized grievance.'”
The case Favorito v. Fulton County, No. 2020CV343938 and was filed in Fulton County Superior Court.
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