Federal judge dismisses complaint against Indiana citizenship verification voting law

Voting rights groups challenging Indiana’s citizenship verification statutes as discriminatory have less than a month to refile their complaint after a federal judge on Thursday dismissed it.

The plaintiffs — League of Women Voters of Indiana, Common Cause Indiana, Hoosier Asian American Power and Exodus Refugee Immigration — filed suit last October in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.

They allege a pair of recently approved state laws discriminate against voters who have become U.S. citizens by subjecting them to citizenship verification that natural-born citizens will never face.

The state of Indiana has rejected or canceled the voter registrations of more than 60% of immigrant Hoosiers challenged under a recent proof of citizenship law — not including several hundred with pending cases.

The four groups have argued the laws have forced them to spend significant money and other resources to counteract the laws’ impacts on the people they serve, distracting from their missions.

But their alleged injuries, according to federal Judge Matthew P. Brookman, don’t hold up to recent precedent established in a 2024 U.S. Supreme Court decision.

“The Court confirmed that an organization cannot ‘manufacture’ its own standing by ‘divert(ing) its resources in response to a defendant’s actions,’” he wrote in a Thursday order.

“These allegations no longer suffice to establish organizational standing because they do not pass muster” under the new test established by FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, he added.

Now, plaintiffs must show the challenged statutes affect or interfere with their core business activities, not just their organizational missions, to illustrate their injuries.

“Here, Plaintiffs do not say what their ‘core business activities’ are, so they have failed to allege facts as to this prong of the AHM organizational-standing test,” the judge opined.

He dismissed the complaint without prejudice and offered the plaintiffs 28 days to file an amended version.

Brookman also denied a motion for a preliminary injunction — which would temporarily pause enforcement of the laws — noting that his dismissal of the complaint leaves no claims pending on which to grant injunctive relief.

Secretary of State Diego Morales has said the statutes boost election security.

The nonpartisan organizations were represented by Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and Daniel Bowman and William Groth of Bowman Legal Services, LLC.

““We are deeply disappointed in the court’s ruling today. Without relief from the court, eligible voters, specifically naturalized and derived U.S. citizens, will be forced to overcome additional hurdles to prove their citizenship simply to remain registered to vote. Indiana’s new documentary proof of citizenship requirements have already misidentified hundreds of eligible U.S. citizens as potential noncitizens, with many more likely to be misidentified, putting their right to vote in jeopardy,” said Ami Gandhi, director of the Midwest Voting Rights Program with Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights.

She noted state and federal law already prohibits noncitizens from voting and every voter affirms their citizenship when registering.

“We will continue to work with our clients and explore the best legal pathway forward that will protect all eligible voters before the November midterm election,” Gandhi said.

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