Federal appeals court tosses Arizona GOP lawsuit seeking to purge 1.27 million voters

ARIZONA — A federal appeals court upheld a lower court’s ruling that tossed out a lawsuit by Arizona Republicans that accused the state of violating federal law and sought to purge up to 1.27 million voters from the rolls. In 2024, then-Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Gina Swoboda, who is now running for the nomination of her party for Secretary of State, along with Arizona Free Enterprise Club President Scot Mussi and unsuccessful 2018 Republican Secretary of State candidate Steve Gaynor sued Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and accused the state of violating the National Voter Registration Act. The lawsuit claimed that Fontes failed to purge over a million ineligible and unaccounted for voters from the state’s registration rolls, costing the Arizona Republican Party time and resources on voter education and mobilization claims. However, a trial court judge concluded that they had no standing to sue. On Tuesday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. “Although plaintiffs allege that ‘known cases of voter fraud’ have occurred in Arizona, they do not allege that any of those cases were the result of inadequate list maintenance or that they affected the plaintiffs,” the three-judge panel wrote in its ruling. “Instead, they argue that they have alleged a ‘substantial risk’ of harm because ineligible voters listed on the rolls might vote in the future.” The appeals court found that they could not establish what the “substantial risk” was, as it was “based on an ‘attenuated chain of inferences.’” At the end of the day, the judges concluded, the harm the Republicans claimed “is entirely hypothetical.” “Such ‘conjectural allegations of potential injuries’ and ‘chain(s) of hypothetical contingencies’ are insufficient to plead an actual or imminent injury,” the court said. “(T)he harm plaintiffs fear is speculative and therefore insufficient to establish an injury in fact.” That upholds what the trial court judge ruled last year, after he similarly found no proof that the trio had any standing to sue Fontes. In the lawsuit, Mussi, Swoboda and Gaynor allege that their votes had been unfairly diluted by the vast number of potential votes cast by potentially ineligible voters. They claimed that between 500,000 and 1.27 million voters remained on the list despite being dead or having moved. They estimated those figures based on the number of voters who didn’t respond when Fontes’ office sent out 752,387 voter registration confirmation notices to Maricopa County residents. His office did remove more than 130,000 people as a result, but the remainder who did not respond were not removed. Their lawsuit also claimed that 2022 voter registration data and U.S. Census Bureau statistics on Apache, La Paz, Navajo and Santa Cruz counties have “implausibly high” voter registration rates. But they didn’t actually have any concrete evidence that voters were registered illegally or that the state had failed to properly maintain its voter rolls. “Plaintiffs do not adequately allege an injury based on their loss of confidence in the integrity of Arizona elections,” the court said. “Plaintiffs may not ‘manufacture standing merely . . . based on their fears of hypothetical future harm that is not certainly impending.’” There has been no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Arizona impacting elections in the state and multiple cases alleging otherwise have been summarily rejected by the courts. Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com.