The U.S. Supreme Court has issued another key ruling involving the widespread use of mail-in ballots ahead of the 2024 election.
Without providing a reason, the justices turned down a case alleging a “crisis of confidence” regarding Oregon’s decades-old mail-in ballot system. The state adopted universal mail-in ballots in 2000 after residents of the state approved it in a 1998 referendum.
The plaintiffs contended that “[e]very phantom vote cast disenfranchises a legitimate vote” and sought to have the court dismantle the state’s mail-in voting system. The district court dismissed the lawsuit last summer, and the plaintiffs then appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which also dismissed the case last December.
“Plaintiffs do not allege that their votes were not counted, nor do they identify with sufficient particularity how any given election in Oregon was fraudulently manipulated through the vote-by-mail or computerized tabulation systems,” the three-judge panel wrote. “Indeed, plaintiffs concede that they do not know whether Oregon elections are fraudulently manipulated at all. Plaintiffs allege only that they suffer a ‘crisis of confidence’ in Oregon’s voting systems, which is the same ‘speculative’ grievance that we found insufficient to confer standing in Lake.”
