Appeals court hands blow to Democrats in ballot order suit

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A federal appellate court ruled Wednesday that a lawsuit over how names are listed on Florida ballots wrongly targeted the state’s chief elections officer, who the court said isn’t responsible for printing ballots and setting the order in which names appear.

The high-stakes jockeying over name order on Florida’s ballot is hardly inconsequential as Republicans and Democrats grapple for every advantage they can get in elections that are often too close to call on election night.

The ruling vacates a U.S. District Court decision handed down in November that sided with Democrats. They had argued that a candidate whose name appears first has an undue advantage.

Under Florida law, President Donald Trump would automatically appear at the top of the ballot in November — ahead of former Vice-President Joe Biden, the presumed Democratic nominee.

That’s because top ballot billing goes to the party of the state’s governor. Republicans have now occupied the governor’s office for two decades. Florida’s name-ordering law dates to 1951, when Democrats were in power.

The Florida Democratic Party, which was not a party to the lawsuit, did not have immediate comment, nor did the national Democratic Party, which was challenging similar ballot order laws in three other states.

In its ruling Wednesday, the appellate court said the plaintiffs in the case lacked standing to sue Florida’s Secretary of State, Laurel Lee.

“None of them proved an injury in fact. And any injury they might suffer is neither fairly traceable to the Secretary nor redressable by a judgment against her because she does not enforce the challenged law,”’ the court ruled.

It said that Florida’s 67 county elections supervisors — none of whom were named as defendants in the case — were responsible for placing candidates on the ballot, not the Secretary of State.

The appellate court instructed the lower court to dismiss the case.

In his ruling in November, Judge Mark Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida said that the current scheme allows the state “to put its thumb on the scale and award an electoral advantage to the party in power.”

Bobby Caina Calvan, The Associated Press