On Monday, federal Judge Timothy Batten, Sr., dismissed a lawsuit from far-right attorney Lin Wood in which the unhinged Trump ally challenged electoral procedures in Georgia ahead of Election Day in the ongoing Senate elections in the state. Wood’s original lawsuit included a demand for “a declaration that [Georgia’s] senatorial runoff election procedures violate his rights to due process, equal protection, and the guarantee of a republican form of government” and “a preliminary and permanent injunction prohibiting [Georgia’s] election procedures in the runoff.” Specifically, Wood targeted Georgia current procedures for verifying mail-in ballot signatures, the processing of some of these ballots before Election Day, and the usage of drop-boxes for mail-in ballots.
🚨BREAKING: Georgia federal court DISMISSES the GOP’s 5th voter suppression lawsuit related to the upcoming Georgia run-off elections. This one by Lin Wood.
GOP and allies are 0-5 in Georgia run-off election litigation. https://t.co/Jedbqb5afO
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) December 28, 2020
Batten concluded that Wood did not have an appropriate legal standing to bring his case in the first place. Citing another ruling, Batten noted that claims that are “plainly undifferentiated and common to all members of the public” do not imbue a plaintiff with the appropriate legal standing to bring their case, and similarly, in cases in which plaintiffs seek relief on the basis of supposedly imminent injury, these plaintiffs “must also demonstrate that the future injury is “certainly impending,”” the judge noted. In other words, legitimate court cases can’t rest on general complaints about the conduct of government, and neither can these cases rest on hypothetical assumptions about what might happen in the future. Political conjecture doesn’t translate to winning court cases.
Outside of the courtroom, Wood’s recent conduct has taken a decidedly bonkers turn. In a particularly cuckoo recent Twitter post, Wood even suggested that Anthony Q. Warner, the apparent suicide bomber behind the recent Christmas morning explosion in Nashville, may have been “falsely accused” of the crime. In a separate post, Wood cast doubt on the reality of the incident, suggesting that the explosion might have come from some source other than the RV that local authorities have credited with the blast. Wood has also appeared to suggest that the Nashville blast, which affected an AT&T building, could have been targeting data confirming that certain voting machines were connected to the internet. (These machines were not actually connected to the internet.)
According to voting rights lawyer Marc Elias’s tally, Wood’s latest defeat is the fifth defeat for Georgia Republicans in Senate election-related litigation; other Republicans have challenged similar election-related policy areas. Wood has worked closely with Sidney Powell, the Trump-allied conspiracy-monger who the president reportedly privately floated as a potential special counsel to investigate election fraud-related issues, although he reportedly backed down from this idea.
