Decision in Hall v. D.C. Board of Elections by Judge Randolph, joined by Judges Pillard and Childs. Excerpts on the theory of vote dilution (lightly revised):

Seven District of Columbia citizen-voters filed a complaint challenging the constitutionality of the Local Resident Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2022, 69 D.C. Reg. 14,601 (Dec. 2, 2022), a D.C. law permitting noncitizens to vote in municipal elections. The district court, without reaching the merits, held that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue and dismissed the complaint. We reverse.

. . .

The plaintiffs here advance a vote-dilution claim predicated on the power of their ballots. They allege that the LRVRAA causes a “debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizen’s vote” from the “expansion[] of the franchise.” (quoting Reynolds). Logically and mathematically, that is true: granting the franchise to noncitizens will expand the D.C. electorate and reduce the voting power of each U.S. citizen voter in local elections.

The claimed injury is hardly abstract, as each voter experiences a direct reduction in the strength of his or her “individual and personal” vote. Gill (quoting Reynolds). The plaintiffs are seeking relief relating to their home jurisdiction and concerning an election in which they will participate. Unlike the statewide theories of harm rejected in Gill, the plaintiffs here do not complain of a harm in a different election that indirectly affects them, nor do they assert claims merely about the composition of the D.C. municipal government writ large. Their claims turn exclusively on their individual votes and the power attached to those votes in the D.C. local elections. . . .

Nor is it dispositive that the plaintiffs’ injuries are “shared by all citizen voters.” The litmus test is not numerosity but concreteness. Under Michel, simply because “all voters in the states suffer[ed] [an] injury . . . d[id] not make it an ‘abstract’ one”—and Michel endorsed a type of injury “suffered by every American voter.” As long as “each person can be said to have suffered a distinct and concrete harm,” id., we do not hold it against some plaintiffs that they may have company. The alternative would be to render government action unreviewable as long as it disadvantages everyone equally. But if, for example, a municipality made all residents ineligible to vote, surely those individuals would have standing to sue. Here, the injury the plaintiffs assert relates to their specific votes in elections in which they intend to participate. That injury is enough to confer standing.