Eleventh Circuit Says Plaintiffs Lack Standing to Challenge Florida's Ballot Sequence Law

Steven D. Schwinn, UIC John Marshall Law School

The Eleventh Circuit ruled this week that a group of Florida voters and organizations lacked standing to challenge the state's law that specifies the order of candidates on its ballots. The ruling dismisses the case and leaves the state law in place.

The plaintiffs in the case--Democratic state voters and organizations--challenged Florida's law that puts the candidate of the party that won the last gubernatorial election in the state at the top of the list of candidates for each office. They claimed that this gives up to a five percent advantage to that party (now Republicans), on average, in elections across the state, and that this violated their right to vote. The district court agreed.

But the Eleventh Circuit ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing. The court held that the plaintiffs couldn't show an injury in fact that flowed from the defendant Secretary of State's actions and that could be redressed by a ruling of the court.

As to injury, the court held that the individual voters couldn't show a direct injury to their right to vote, and that their claims of vote dilution were insufficient to establish standing (because they relied on the statewide average vote dilution, not their own particular dilution). The court held that the organizations lacked associational standing for the same reasons, and that they lacked organizational standing (on their own) under a diversion-of-resources theory. According to the court, that's because they failed to show what activities they'd divert their resources from in order to deal with the ballot-sequence law.

As to causation and redressability, the court said that the Secretary didn't have authority under state law to enforce the ballot-sequence provision--the county supervisors do, and they're not part of the case--and so the plaintiffs couldn't show that the Secretary's actions caused any injury, or that judicial relief aimed at the Secretary would redress any injury.

Judge William Pryor concurred, arguing that the case also raised a non-justiciable political question (because the court didn't have "discernable and manageable standards" to work it out).

Judge Jill Pryor agreed that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate an injury. But she argued that the question of the Secretary's authority under state law was much more complicated than the majority made it out to be, and she therefore wouldn't have ruled on causation and redressability. Judge Pryor argued that the court, by ruling on those points when it wasn't necessary, "creates a circuit split on the connection a state official must have with a challenged state statute for a plaintiff to satisfy traceability and redressability."