A federal judge in Georgia on Monday rejected a lawsuit filed by attorney Lin Wood, which sought to challenge the constitutionality of election procedures implemented ahead of Senate runoff elections. Wood, a pro-Trump lawyer who has been involved in a number of post-election lawsuits, has once again failed to notch a victory in court.
“For the following reasons, Wood lacks standing to pursue his claims. Accordingly, the Court need not reach the merits of Wood’s TRO argument, and this case will be dismissed,” U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten of the Northern District of Georgia—an appointee of George W. Bush—began.
The judge provided a litany of reasons as to why Wood lacked standing to bring the lawsuit, which specifically alleged that the rules concerning signature verifications, absentee ballot processing, and drop box installations violated his constitutional rights.
“Throughout much of his complaint, Wood repeats that he suffered an injury from Defendants’ purported violations of Georgia law,” Batten wrote. “However, as this Court has previously pointed out to Wood, ‘[c]laims premised on allegations that the law . . . has not been followed . . . [are] precisely the kind of undifferentiated, generalized grievance about the conduct of government . . . [and] quite different from the sorts of injuries alleged by plaintiffs in voting rights cases where we have found standing.’”
According to Batten, even if Wood had claimed to have suffered a sufficiently particularized injury, he failed to plead that there was a “substantial risk” the injury would occur as required by law.
“Here, Wood presumes that a chain of events—including the manipulation of signature-comparison procedures, abuse of ballot drop boxes, intentional mishandling of absentee ballots, and exploitation of Dominion’s voting machines—will occur,” Batten wrote.
“Wood attempts to show that fraud is certain to occur during the runoff by arguing that the November 3 general election was rife with fraud. However, even if that were the case, the alleged presence of harm during the general election does not increase the likelihood of harm during the runoff.”
Batten also shot down debunked claims that Dominion Voting Systems—which provided hardware and software for voting machines in several states—was used to switch votes from President Donald Trump to President-elect Joe Biden. In his initial complaint, Wood said he faced “imminent harm” because Dominion “was founded by foreign oligarchs and dictators” seeking to ensure that “Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez never lost another election.”
“Not only is this allegation astonishingly speculative, but it also presumes that because independent bad actors allegedly fixed the election of a now-deceased Venezuelan president, fraud will recur during Georgia’s runoff,” Batten wrote. “Even if Wood’s alleged fraudulent events were to ultimately occur, he has not shown more than a possible future injury. This is insufficient to confer standing.”
Last week, Dominion warned numerous parties of imminent litigation, including Wood.
Wood’s unsuccessful litigation has been under the microscope since the election, but he’s also taken some heat for telling Republicans to boycott Georgia’s tremendously consequential runoff elections in January. He even tweeted a diagram suggesting that incumbent Republican Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue should be arrested. These elections will determine the balance of power in the Senate chamber, with Democrats needing to win both elections to bring an end to Sen. Mitch McConnell’s majority.
Read the full ruling below:
Order Denying TRO and Dismissing Case Wood III by Law&Crime on Scribd
[image via Apu Gomes/Getty Images]
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