General Election. And the “burden that [a state’s] signature-match scheme imposes on the right to vote… falls on vote-by-mail and provisional voters’ fundamental right to vote.” Democratic Exec. Comm. of Fla. v. Lee, 915 F.3d 1312, 1319 (11th Cir. 2019).
This leaves Wood to speculate that, because the Settlement Agreement required three ballot clerks—as opposed to just one—to review an absentee ballot before it could be rejected, fewer ballots were ultimately rejected, invalid ballots were tabulated, and his in-person vote was diluted. In support of this argument, Wood relies on Baker v. Carr, where the Supreme Court found vote dilution in the context of apportionment of elected representatives. 369 U.S. at 204–208. But Wood cannot transmute allegations that state officials violated state law into a claim that his vote was somehow weighted differently than others. This theory has been squarely rejected. Bognet, 2020 WL 6686120, at *11 (“[T]he Voter Plaintiffs cannot analogize their Equal Protection claim to gerrymandering cases in which votes were weighted differently. Instead, Plaintiffs advance an Equal Protection Clause argument based solely on state officials’ alleged violation of state law that does not cause unequal treatment. And if dilution of lawfully cast ballots by the ‘unlawful’ counting of invalidly cast ballots were a true equal-protection problem, then it would transform every violation of state election law (and, actually, every
