You can always count on them (to be awful and lawless).
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday restored several pieces of a 2021 Texas election law that overhauled mail-in and assisted voting, overturning a lower court’s block on those provisions.
Five years ago, Texas passed Senate Bill 1, a wide-reaching election law that changed the way local officials administer elections and how some Texans vote, particularly aimed at initiatives Harris County implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. The law was denounced by voter advocacy groups, civil rights organizations and Democratic lawmakers, who broke quorum in an attempt to stifle the bill.
After several lawsuits over accessibility concerns created by the new law were consolidated into a single suit, a district judge in March 2025 struck down nine of its provisions. Those blocked provisions included requiring Texans to provide an identification number or social security number on mail in ballot applications and have them match the state’s records. The judge also blocked provisions that create processes for curing defective ballots and require voters and those who assist them in filling out their ballot to sign an oath swearing they did not coerce the voter and disclose how they’re related.
The plaintiffs who sued argued the provisions were overly cumbersome and restrictive for voters with disabilities, and the district judge agreed, ruling they violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. Texas allows voters who are over the age of 65 and those with certain disabilities, among others, to vote by mail.
Wednesday’s 11-page ruling from the Fifth Circuit reverses the district judge’s ruling in its entirety, finding that the plaintiffs lacked standing on most of their complaints. The written opinion strongly rebuked the lower courts’ decisions in the suit, noting that appellate judges have “reversed the district court on everything” through the suit’s five years of litigation.
“The bulk of the plaintiffs’ claims fail for lack of standing. One fails on the merits. But none justifies interference with the State Legislature’s efforts to prevent voter fraud and to protect election integrity,” Judge Andrew Oldham wrote in the opinion.
See here and here for some background. This appears to be the endpoint of a lawsuit that has a long history, mostly of getting abused by the Fifth Circuit. Democracy Docket adds some details.
The ruling affects several restrictions on mail-in voting and voter assistance. Among them are rules requiring some voters to provide an identification number that matches state records, requirements for people who help voters cast ballots and limits on paid voter assistance and canvassing.
The opinion opened with an unusual and extraordinary attack on mail-in voting, portraying the practice itself as a threat to democracy.
“It has long been established that mail-in ballots are prone to fraud,” Judge Andrew Oldham wrote. “That is why voting by mail jeopardizes election integrity and democracy itself.”
The sweeping claim goes well beyond what the evidence shows. Fraud involving mail-in ballots is exceedingly rare, and research has not found evidence that mail-in voting produces widespread voter fraud as anti-voting activists have suggested over the years.
Election officials also use safeguards including ballot tracking and other security measures to detect improper ballots.
Oldham cited a 2014 federal district court opinion stating that mail-in ballots are “not secure,” a decision the Fifth Circuit later affirmed in relevant part. But his broader assertion that mail-in voting itself jeopardizes democracy was the court’s characterization, not a finding that widespread mail-ballot fraud had occurred.
A federal district court blocked nine provisions of SB 1 in March 2025 after finding that they violated the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, two federal laws that protect people with disabilities from discrimination.
Wednesday’s ruling wipes away that decision.
But in most of the case, the appeals court did not decide whether the challenged provisions actually violate those disability laws. Instead, it ruled that the groups challenging the law had not shown the kind of direct, ongoing harm needed to bring those claims in federal court.
For the mail-in ballot identification rules, the court said the plaintiffs had not shown that a specific voter was likely to be harmed again in a future election. The opinion pointed to voters who had previously struggled with the new requirements but had since learned how to comply with them.
The court also noted that the share of mail-in ballot applications or ballots rejected because of missing or mismatched identification numbers had dropped from 11% or 12% to 2.7% within eight months.
The appeals court used similar reasoning to reject challenges to SB 1’s voter assistance rules, saying earlier Fifth Circuit decisions had already undercut the plaintiffs’ claims.
All those poor suckers – including a significant number of Republicans – who had their votes tossed in 2022 before election officials and anyone affiliated with campaigns got the hang of things are just out of luck. I cannot say this often enough: The Fifth Circuit, whose sole guiding principle is that Republicans can do whatever they want and Democrats can get stuffed, must be as high a priority for any court reform effort we might undertake in 2029 as SCOTUS is, or we’re just kidding around. This court is wicked and corrupt and it must be rebuilt. No excuses. Mother Jones has more.
Thanks for including a link the actual opinion
The reasoning here is concerning: We reversed before and “[t]today we do it again.”
Then they go on with a string of citations to prior related rulings, all ostensibly favoring the Republican position on voting procedures.
This strikes me as not only self-referential, but as an indication that the outcome of the current appeal was predetermined. The specific legal issues are, of course, distinct in each appeal, but here judgment is passed categorically on an entire class of claims (ballet access/voting procedures), apparently based on the identity of the contesting parties.
An astute observer may have noticed a pattern of the 5th Circuit consistently ruling against advocates of easier access to the ballot. But it’s not even necessary to compile a data set to find out whether that impression (hypothesis) holds water empirically, or to what extent. The appellate court does us the favor of pointing out the consistent pattern in its own decisionmaking (i.e. manifested bias, not just inferred bias) in ballet access litigation. And not even with judicious detachment, but with loaded language.
Note that the organizational plaintiffs are denounced as “serial litigants.” As if the Texas Attorney General were not a serial advocate in the courts too. Not to mention that the other defendants are repeat players as well.
TAKING POT SHOTS AT SERIAL CONTESTANTS
If *serial* denotes repeat player (the correct scholarly term, as distinguished from one-shotters), the defendants are *serial litigants* as much as the plaintiffs. But the term that conjures the specter of serial killers – or at the minimum its pejorative connotation – was here deliberately chosen to de-legitimate the organizational plaintiffs. We can see that from the tenor of the opinion overall. And as for word choice, it’s highly doubtful that the Fifth Circuit would call the Texas Attorney General a serial litigant.
I asked Google (AI) whether Ken Paxton is a serial litigant, and this is what I got:
AI Overview: Ken Paxton is not a “serial litigant” in the traditional legal sense—a term usually reserved for private citizens who file repetitive, personal, or frivolous lawsuits—but as the Attorney General of Texas, he is widely recognized for an exceptionally aggressive, high-volume litigation strategy.
I don’t put much faith in AI responses as to specific facts; nor should you. But at the minimum we can acknowledge that the AI output is based on massive amounts of digested text and captures patterns in language usage. So, at the minimum, it helps with the semantics. “Serial litigant” is not a neutral term. It’s used for depreciation.
As applied to the self-admitted pattern of decisions in this class of cases, we might, with equal justification, call the Fifth Circuit a
SERIAL KILLER OF VOTING RIGHTS CHALLENGES.
That would be a polemical response, to be sure, but the Court itself is here inviting it with disgust-inducing language about the plaintiffs and their legal contentions. Alas. This obviously also triggered Kuff, though I am glad he doesn’t call for the wisdom center to be burned down, which would deter me from offering my own critical thoughts in the same forum, lest I be accused of rhetorical arson, metaphorically speaking.
The discourse in the public marketplace of ideas can be boisterous, of course, but the critical concern here is this: Should such partisan and incendiary rhetoric emanate from an appellate court? Should the Court itself be enganged in flaming?
The gist and thrust from high-up is this: How dare you – you serial litigants – even bother us with this stuff !?
And as for the unnamed district court, i.e., the judge below, he gets a scolding for resolving the questions presented contrary to the well-engrained decisional proclivities of the Fifth Circuit. Maybe the district judge is biased too, just in the opposite direction. But what about the merits of the specific issues before both courts? Why such acrimony to distract from the substance of what’s at stake?
A more sober response to the Fifth Circuit’s incendiary issuance would be this: Where should questions of whether or not a new statute complies with ADA be addressed but in court? Isn’t that what courts are for? To resolve disargreements over what the law is (or requires) when it’s not clear or where two laws appear to be in conflict such as federal law and state laws here?
The Fifth Circuit is undermining the very concept that disputed legal questions should be taken to a court of competent jurisdiction for resolution; that the judicial forum provides a neutral arbiter of legal questions. The message sent here is that the partisan acts (here by the Republicans) are uncontestable. That there is something improper about bringing the legal disputes concerning the manner and modalities of exercising the right to vote into court in the first instance.
MERITS AVOIDANCE ENCORE
Note also that they resolved (most of) the latest appeal on lack-of-standing grounds, a doctrine rampantly invoked these days to AVOID deciding the merits of the legal issues actually presented and sought to be litigated.
Instead of providing answers to important legal questions that have a bearing on the quality of democracy and citizen’s control of their government – with reasoned and preferably erudite analysis – we get a denunciation of the organizational questioners as “serial litigants” while the individual natural-person plaintiffs (i.e., actual voters) get dismissed as dimwits.