The Ninth Circuit, sitting en banc, just delivered a significant course correction on organizational standing.
In Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans v. Mayes, three advocacy groups challenged two 2022 amendments to Arizona’s voter registration laws. But before reaching the substance of those challenges, the en banc court confronted a threshold question the Ninth Circuit has struggled with for over a decade: what does it actually take for an organization to show it has been injured by a law it opposes?
After FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a lot more than it used to. The first provision—requiring county recorders to cancel a voter’s old registration when that voter registers in a new county—never reached the merits. The organizations claimed they would need to divert resources to educate voters about the provision’s effects. But under Hippocratic Medicine, self-generated expenditures don’t cut it: “an organization that has not suffered a concrete injury caused by a defendant’s action cannot spend its way into standing simply by expending money to gather information and advocate against the defendant’s action.” The organizations never showed the provision directly affected or interfered with their core activities.
In so holding, the court expressly overruled Ninth Circuit precedents that had treated mission frustration plus resource diversion as an automatic ticket to federal court—a framework that effectively gave any advocacy group with a policy position and a dollar standing to challenge any law it disliked.
The second provision—a felony criminalizing “providing a mechanism for voting” to someone registered in another state—cleared the standing bar because it arguably reached voter registration work and created a credible threat of prosecution. But the court rejected the challenge on the merits, holding that “mechanism for voting” refers to the instruments used to cast a vote, not registration or mobilization.
Judge Bress’s concurrence, joined by four colleagues, sharpened the point: the organizations’ injuries fell on third-party voters, not on the organizations themselves, and that distinction should have been dispositive under Hippocratic Medicine.
Read Opinion Here: AZ Alliance for Retired Americans v. Mayes