[PUBLISH]
IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT FILED
________________________ U.S. COURT OF APPEALS
ELEVENTH CIRCUIT
No. 10-14901 FEB 2, 2012
________________________ JOHN LEY
CLERK
D.C. Docket No. 1:09-cv-02674-TWT
HASSAN SWANN,
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll Plaintiff - Appellant,
DAVID A. HARTFIELD,
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll Plaintiff,
versus
SECRETARY, STATE OF GEORGIA,
in his official capacity as Secretary of State for the State of Georgia,
THE DEKALB COUNTY BOARD OF REGISTRATIONS AND ELECTIONS,
MICHAEL P. COVENY,
CATHERINE GILLIARD,
LEONA PERRY, et al.,
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll Defendants - Appellees.
________________________
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Northern District of Georgia
________________________
(February 2, 2012)
Before EDMONDSON and PRYOR, Circuit Judges, and HOPKINS,* District Judge.
PRYOR, Circuit Judge:
This appeal addresses whether a former inmate of a county jail has standing
to complain that state and local officials failed to mail him a ballot at the jail even
though he never asked them to mail him a ballot there. Hassan Swann appeals the
summary judgment in favor of the Secretary of State of Georgia and several
elections officials for DeKalb County, Georgia. Swann’s complaint alleges that
the officials’ application of a Georgia statute that governs absentee voting, Ga.
Code Ann. § 21-2-381(a)(1)(D), denied him the right to have a ballot mailed to
him at the jail and prevented him from voting while he was incarcerated in the fall
of 2008. But Swann would not have received a ballot at the jail regardless of the
officials’ application of the statute because he provided only his home address on
his application for an absentee ballot. Swann’s alleged injury was not fairly
traceable to any actions of the officials. We vacate the summary judgment entered
by the district court and remand with instructions to dismiss for lack of subject
matter jurisdiction.
*
Honorable Virginia Emerson Hopkins, United States District Judge for the Northern
District of Alabama, sitting by designation.
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I. BACKGROUND
In anticipation of the presidential election held on November 4, 2008, the
staff of the DeKalb County Jail held voter registration drives at the jail and
encouraged inmates to register to vote and to apply for absentee ballots. Hassan
Swann was among the inmates who completed an application for an absentee
ballot. Swann was a resident of DeKalb County and was incarcerated in the jail
from September to December 2008 based on a misdemeanor conviction. The
application requested on separate lines Swann’s “Address as Registered” and
“Address (Ballot to be mailed).” Swann wrote the address of his home in DeKalb
County on the line labeled “Address as Registered.” He left blank the space for
his “Address (Ballot to be mailed),” because, as he later testified at his deposition,
he “didn’t know DeKalb County[] [Jail’s] address.” He makes no allegation that
any of the officials refused to tell him the address of the jail or instructed him to
leave blank the space for the mailing address.
Other inmates requested on their applications that their absentee ballots be
mailed to the jail, and on September 29, 2008, Maxine Daniels, the assistant
director of registrations and elections for DeKalb County, informed an employee
of the jail that the absentee ballot clerk would not mail absentee ballots to the jail.
Daniels explained that, under Georgia law, the clerk “could not mail an absentee
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ballot for a non-disabled voter to another address in DeKalb County other than
their registered address.” She based this explanation on a Georgia statute that
provides that, “[e]xcept in the case of physically disabled electors residing in the
county or municipality, no absentee ballot shall be mailed to an address other than
the permanent mailing address of the elector as recorded on the elector’s voter
registration record or a temporary out-of-county or out-of-municipality address,”
Ga. Code Ann. § 21-2-381(a)(1)(D).
Daniels and Jeffrey Mann, the chief deputy sheriff of DeKalb County, later
developed a solution to allow inmates to receive their ballots at the jail. They
agreed that the absentee ballot clerk would mail ballots to the home addresses of
inmates, and relatives of inmates would be permitted to leave the ballots in a drop
box at the jail for distribution to the inmates. Swann contends that he “was
unaware of the drop box and expected the election office to mail his absentee
ballot to the jail given that he would still be confined on election day,” even
though he had listed only his home address on his application for an absentee
ballot.
The absentee ballot clerk did not mail Swann’s ballot to the jail. Daniels
testified that, according to her records, the absentee ballot clerk mailed Swann a
ballot to Swann’s home address because that was the only address that Swann had
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provided. Swann never received his ballot, and he was unable to vote in the
election held on November 4, 2008.
Swann and another former inmate, David A. Hartfield, filed a complaint in
the district court against the officials. The complaint alleged that their application
of section 21-2-381(a)(1)(D) was unconstitutional because it “prevents people who
are incarcerated in county jails, but who retain the right to vote, from voting by
absentee ballot if they are incarcerated in the county of their residence.” The
complaint alleged that application of the statute by the officials violated the Equal
Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because it deprived an inmate
incarcerated in his county of residence the right to have a ballot mailed to him at
the jail. The complaint also alleged a violation of the Due Process Clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment. The complaint requested declaratory and injunctive
relief, nominal damages, and attorney’s fees. Before it ruled on the claims alleged
in the complaint, the district court dismissed Hartfield as a plaintiff because of his
failure to comply with an order of the court.
Swann and the officials filed motions for summary judgment, and the
district court granted a summary judgment in favor of the officials. The district
court reasoned that, because Swann did not request that his ballot be mailed to the
jail, his “equal protection claim fails because he was not treated differently than
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similarly situated inmates.” The district court also reasoned that the statute “did
not prevent [Swann] from [voting]” because “even if Georgia law permitted the
Board to mail absentee ballots to inmates confined in their county of residence,
Swann’s ballot would still have been mailed to his registered address, not the
DeKalb County jail.” The district court did not address whether Swann had
standing.
II. STANDARD OF REVIEW
“We review issues of standing de novo.” Hollywood Mobile Estates Ltd. v.
Seminole Tribe of Fla.,
641 F.3d 1259, 1264 (11th Cir. 2011) (quoting Common
Cause/Ga. v. Billups,
554 F.3d 1340, 1349 (11th Cir. 2009)) (internal quotation
marks omitted).
III. DISCUSSION
We cannot reach the merits of this appeal because Swann lacks standing.
“Article III of the United States Constitution limits the jurisdiction of federal
courts to ‘Cases’ and ‘Controversies.’” Hollywood Mobile
Estates, 641 F.3d at
1264 (quoting U.S. Const. Art. III, § 2). “Standing is an irreducible minimum
necessary under Article III’s case-or-controversy requirement.” Kelly v. Harris,
331 F.3d 817, 819 (11th Cir. 2003). We have held that “‘[s]tanding is a threshold
jurisdictional question which must be addressed prior to and independent of the
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merits of a party’s claims.’” Bochese v. Town of Ponce Inlet,
405 F.3d 964, 974
(11th Cir. 2005) (quoting Dillard v. Baldwin Cnty. Comm’rs,
225 F.3d 1271, 1275
(11th Cir. 2000)). “The Supreme Court has explained that the ‘irreducible
constitutional minimum’ of standing under Article III consists of three elements:
an actual or imminent injury, causation, and redressability.” Hollywood Mobile
Estates, 641 F.3d at 1265 (citing Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife,
504 U.S. 555,
560–61,
112 S. Ct. 2130, 2136 (1992)).
We need not determine whether Swann suffered an injury when he did not
receive a ballot or whether a favorable decision would redress this alleged injury
because Swann’s non-receipt of a ballot was not “‘fairly . . . trace[able] to the
challenged action of the defendant[s].’”
Lujan, 504 U.S. at 560, 112 S. Ct. at 2136
(first and second alterations in original) (quoting Simon v. E. Ky. Welfare Rights
Org.,
426 U.S. 26, 41–42,
96 S. Ct. 1917, 1926 (1976)). Lujan explained that an
injury is not fairly traceable to the actions of a defendant if caused by the
“‘independent action of some third party not before the court,’”
Lujan, 504 U.S. at
560, 112 S. Ct. at 2136 (quoting
Simon, 426 U.S. at 42, 96 S. Ct. at 1926), and
likewise a controversy is not justiciable when a plaintiff independently caused his
own injury. Cf. Pennsylvania v. New Jersey,
426 U.S. 660, 664,
96 S. Ct. 2333,
2335 (1976); see also Ass’n of Cmty. Orgs. for Reform Now v. Fowler,
178 F.3d
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350, 358 (5th Cir. 1999). Several of our sister circuits similarly have held that a
plaintiff lacks standing to challenge a rule if an independent source would have
caused him to suffer the same injury. See, e.g., Donahue v. City of Boston,
371
F.3d 7, 14 (1st Cir. 2004); Marshall v. Meadows,
105 F.3d 904, 906 (4th Cir.
1997); Howard v. N.J. Dep’t of Civil Serv.,
667 F.2d 1099, 1101–03 (3d Cir.
1981). See also 13A Charles Alan Wright, Arthur R. Miller & Edward H. Cooper,
Federal Practice and Procedure § 3531.5 (3d ed. 2008) (“Rather than a break in
one causal chain, standing may be defeated by finding a different cause.”).
Swann’s failure to provide the address of the jail on his application independently
caused his alleged injury. Swann would not have received a ballot at the jail
regardless of the application of the statute by the officials.
Swann’s lawsuit is based on an imaginary set of facts: an imaginary request
to send his ballot to the jail and an imaginary refusal on the ballot clerk’s part to
send a ballot to him. Swann asked the ballot clerk to mail Swann’s absentee ballot
to Swann’s home – no other address was given in the application for the ballot –
and the clerk says a ballot was sent to Swann’s home. Nothing wrongful can arise
from those facts.
Swann erroneously argues that we should apply a futility exception to the
standing requirement and excuse his failure to request that his ballot be mailed to
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the jail. He contends that “it is unequivocally clear that if [he] had indeed
requested on his absentee ballot application that his ballot be mailed to him at the
DeKalb County jail, nothing different would have happened,” but Swann can only
speculate that the absentee ballot clerk would have dishonored a request to mail
his ballot to the jail. The authorities that Swann cites are inapposite. These
decisions either address pre-enforcement challenges to statutes, see, e.g., Fla. State
Conf. of NAACP v. Browning,
522 F.3d 1153, 1164 (11th Cir. 2008), or involve
the submission of successive applications to an administrative board after the
plaintiff has already made at least one submission, see, e.g., Greenbriar, Ltd. v.
City of Alabaster,
881 F.2d 1570, 1575–76 (11th Cir. 1989).
Swann did not have standing to sue the officials, and the district court erred
when it granted a summary judgment. “‘[A] grant of summary judgment is a
decision on the merits[,] . . . [but] a court must dismiss a case without ever
reaching the merits if it concludes that it has no jurisdiction.’” Goodman ex rel.
Goodman v. Sipos,
259 F.3d 1327, 1331 n.6 (11th Cir. 2001) (third and fourth
alterations in original) (quoting Capitol Leasing Co. v. Fed. Deposit Ins. Corp.,
999 F.2d 188, 191 (7th Cir. 1993)).
IV. CONCLUSION
We VACATE the judgment of the district court and REMAND with
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instructions to DISMISS for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.
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