Attorney Lin Wood Appeals Georgia Election Case to Supreme Court

Lin Wood speaks at a press conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., on Nov. 8, 2011. (Eric Thayer/Getty Images)

Attorney Lin Wood has filed an appeal to the Supreme Court asking the justices to review his case that argues Georgia’s 2020 presidential election was “unlawful.”

His request to the nation’s top court was filed on Tuesday shortly after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld a decision to dismiss his case due to the lack of legal standing to bring the case. The Supreme Court docketed Wood’s petition for a writ of certiorari—the request to review the case—on Friday.

“I strongly believe my appeal to U.S. Supreme Court has merit & 11/3 GA election was unlawful,” Wood said in a statement on Friday.

“My legal rationale tracks subsequently filed Texas petition re: GA. After 43 years of law practice, I know lawyers cannot control judges. We do the best we can & pray they get it right,” he added.

Wood’s case argues that an agreement between Georgia election officials and the state’s Democratic Party that changed the process of handling absentee ballots in Georgia is unconstitutional.

Under the U.S. Constitution, only state legislatures and Congress can prescribe the “times, places, and manner of holding elections.”

He argues that the state officials were unauthorized to change the manner of processing absentee ballots in a way that was contrary with the state election code, and hence, the counting of absentee ballots for the general election in the state is therefore “improper and must not be permitted.”

The March 2020 agreement between Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the State Election Board, and various state Democratic entities changed the way absentee ballots are processed in a way that isn’t consistent with election laws passed by the Georgia Legislature.

According to the agreement, county officials are required to form a committee of three people if any one official believes an absentee ballot is defective because the voter’s signature on the ballot envelope doesn’t match the signature on file. If a majority in the committee determines that the signature doesn’t match, it can then “reject” the ballot.

“Under the Litigation Settlement, any determination of a signature mismatch would lead to the cumbersome process described in the settlement, which was not intended by the Georgia Legislature, which authorized those decisions to be made by single election officials,” Wood argues in the lawsuit.

“The Litigation Settlement by itself has created confusion, misplaced incentives, and undermined the confidence of the voters of the State of Georgia in the electoral system. Neither it nor any of the activities spawned by it were authorized by the Georgia Legislature, as required by the United States Constitution.”

Judge Steven Grimberg of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia dismissed the effort on Nov. 19, saying that Wood lacked legal standing as an individual voter to challenge Georgia’s election procedures. Grimberg’s decision prompted an appeal to the 11th Circuit.

Georgia officials had previously dismissed the allegations as “baseless.”

On Dec. 5, a panel from the circuit court upheld Grimberg’s decision, opining that Wood lacks standing because “he fails to allege a particularized injury.” They added that since Georgia has already certified its election results, Wood’s request is this “moot” to the extent it concerns the 2020 election.

Wood argued in his petition (pdf) that he did suffer an injury because “his vote and the votes of all other in-person voters will be given less weight in comparison to mail-in voters in a manner that was not intended by the election framework adopted by the Georgia Legislature.”

He added that the questions presented in his case are not moot because the constitutional violation “will be repeated again on January 5, 2021, during the runoff election for the two Georgia U.S. Senate seats.”

“The ongoing nature of the constitutional violation and the possibility that this unconstitutional scheme cannot be legislatively rectified before the January 5, 2021 election (which is already ongoing) renders false that any argument that this matter is moot,” he argued.

The Supreme Court docketed Wood’s case hours before it decided to deny Texas’s bid to challenge 2020 election results in four battleground states, including Georgia.

Wood has also joined forces with lawyer Sidney Powell who is challenging election results in battleground states over allegations that the use of the voting software, Dominion Voting Systems, facilitated opportunities for election fraud.

The case is cited Wood v. Raffensperger (District: 1:20-cv-04651/Appeals: 20-14418/Supreme Court: 20-799).