For the second time this year, a federal judge has dismissed a Republican-led lawsuit that accused Nevada officials of improperly maintaining the state’s voter rolls, adding to the litany of GOP defeats in court this cycle.
In a ruling issued Friday afternoon, Judge Cristina Silva determined that the Republican National Committee (RNC) and Nevada Republican Party had again failed to establish standing while arguing that high voter registration rates in five Nevada counties had harmed their overall mission and campaign activities. She will, however, allow the GOP to file an amended lawsuit, as she did in her June dismissal of the first iteration of the lawsuit.
The lawsuit is the latest legal defeat for the RNC and Nevada GOP, which have filed a slew of lawsuits in Nevada this year related to voter rolls and mail ballot procedures. Republicans have not succeeded in any of their Nevada lawsuits this year, but some of the cases are in various stages of appeal.
Democrats have argued that the GOP is pursuing long-shot lawsuits to sow distrust in election systems, while Republicans say they are necessary measures to rebuild faith in elections.
An RNC spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment Monday.
This legal battle began in March when the GOP groups, alongside Washoe County resident Scott Johnston, filed a lawsuit that argued five Nevada counties had “impossibly high” voter registration rates in violation of federal elections law. State elections officials, meanwhile, said the allegations were meritless and based on a flawed comparison of two datasets that it described as “comparing apples to orangutans.
The two datasets were the Census Population Survey — a Census poll that the state says is an unreliable source for voter registration — and the Census’ annual data collection of the American voting age population.
Silva dismissed this suit in June, ruling that the GOP had failed to establish standing and the timing of the lawsuit did not offer the state an opportunity to immediately solve the alleged problem because of federal restrictions on changing voter rolls before elections.
In July, Republicans filed an updated lawsuit that further elaborated how they have been harmed. They argued that false voter registration data imperils the party’s ability to form winning campaign strategies, causes the party to divert resources if it is spending time canvassing ineligible voters and prevents candidates from running the most effective campaigns possible.
However, Silva ruled in her latest dismissal that these reasons were unconvincing.
The dismissal relied heavily on a September ruling in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — the federal appeals court that oversees Nevada — that addressed the topic of whether organizations have standing to file a lawsuit. The ruling — which sought to clarify the confusing and conflicting precedent on organizational standing — asserted that groups “can no longer spend their way into standing based on vague claims that a policy hampers their mission.”
In Silva’s ruling, she determined that the GOP groups “merely provide general assertions of what has happened, without any concrete specifics.”
Additionally, Silva once again ruled that the state election officials had no opportunity to solve the alleged issue because federal law prohibits systematic voter roll changes within 90 days of an election. The original lawsuit was filed March 18, which was less than 90 days before Nevada’s June primaries.
Silva allowed Republicans to file an updated lawsuit by Nov. 1 because the Ninth Circuit ruling was unavailable when the amended complaint was filed in July.
