One.
- 2. Vote Dilution—Count Two
In Count Two, Plaintiffs allege Equal Protection violations based on Defendants’ failure to comply with Arizona law by permitting “illegal votes,” allowing “voting fraud and manipulation,” and in preventing “actual observation and access to the elector process,” which allegedly resulted in “the dilution of lawful votes… and the counting of unlawful votes.” (Doc. 1 at 45). Plaintiffs ask the Court to order that “no ballot processed by a counting board in Arizona can be included in the final vote tally unless a challenger [i]s allowed to meaningfully observe the process.” (Doc 1 ¶ 120). Absent from the Complaint is an allegation that Plaintiffs (or any registered Arizona voter for that matter) were deprived of their right to vote. Instead, they bring baseless claims of “disparate treatment of Arizona voters, in subjecting one class of voters to greater burdens or scrutiny than another.” (Doc. 1 ¶ 115). They do not allege what “class” of voters were treated disparately. Nor do the Elector Plaintiffs cite to any authority that they, as “elector delegates,” are a class of protected voters. Defendants contend that Plaintiffs do not have standing to assert these claims and point out that these allegations are nothing more than generalized grievances that any one of the 3.4 million Arizonans who voted could make if they were so allowed. The Court agrees.
Here, Plaintiffs have not alleged a concrete harm that would allow the Court to find Article III Standing for their vote dilution claim. As courts have routinely explained, vote dilution is a very specific claim that involves votes being weighed differently and cannot be used generally to allege voter fraud. “Contrary to the Voter Plaintiffs’ conceptualization, vote dilution under the Equal Protection Clause is concerned with votes being weighed differently.” Bognet, 980 F.3d at 355; see also Rucho v. Common Cause, ––– U.S. ––––, 139 S. Ct. 2484, 2501 (2019) (“[V]ote dilution in the one-person, one-vote cases refers to the idea that each vote must carry equal weight.”). “This conceptualization of vote dilution—state actors counting ballots in violation of state election law—is not a concrete harm under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Violation
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