WASHINGTON—Today, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, reversing an erroneous district court opinion, ruled that the Immigration Reform Law Institute’s clients—DC politician Stacia Hall, Second Amendment activist Dick Heller, and five other DC U.S. citizen voters—had standing to bring their suit challenging DC’s law allowing noncitizens, including illegal aliens, to vote in local DC elections.
Previously, a lower federal court had dismissed the case for lack of standing. That court claimed that plaintiffs would not even be injured by the law, because their votes would be counted equally with those of the new noncitizen voters.
Today, however, the DC Circuit, analyzing controlling precedent, held that a reduction in the power of every DC citizen voter’s vote by the addition of noncitizens’ votes constituted a “concrete and particularized” injury sufficient for standing, not a mere “generalized grievance.” As the court stated,
As long as each person can be said to have suffered a distinct and concrete harm, we do not hold it against some plaintiffs that they may have company. The alternative would be to render government action unreviewable as long as it disadvantages everyone equally. But if, for example, a municipality made all residents ineligible to vote, surely those individuals would have standing to sue. Here, the injury the plaintiffs assert relates to their specific votes in elections in which they intend to participate. That injury is enough to confer standing.
“‘We the People’ established the Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land,” said Dale L. Wilcox, executive director and general counsel of IRLI. “That means the people are sovereign, and laws like DC’s that diminish that sovereignty violate the Constitution. We are pleased the court clearly saw that our clients will be injured by DC’s law, and look forward to showing that it violates our Constitution at a very basic level.”
The case is Hall v. DC Board of Elections, No. 24-7050 (DC Circuit).
