In re Khanoyan

• Decision Date: 06 January 2022
• Docket Number: No. 21-1111,21-1111
• Parties: IN RE Ranya KHANOYAN, Alan Vera, David Lugo, Tom S. Ramsey and R. Jack Cagle, Relators
• Court: Texas Supreme Court

637 S.W.3d 762

IN RE Ranya KHANOYAN, Alan Vera, David Lugo, Tom S. Ramsey and R. Jack Cagle, Relators

No. 21-1111

Supreme Court of Texas.

OPINION DELIVERED: January 6, 2022

Chad Wilson Dunn, Rolando L. Rios, K. Scott Brazil, Karla Aghedo, for Respondents Rodney Ellis, Precinct 1 Harris County Commissioner, Harris County Commissioners Court, Lina Hidalgo, Harris County Judge, Adrian Garcia, Precinct 2 Harris County Commissioner, Harris County.

Christopher K. Gober, William A. ‘Andy’ Taylor, Joseph O. Slovacek, Houston, for Relators Lugo, David, Cagle, R. Jack, Vera, Alan, Khanoyan, Ranya, Ramsey, Tom S.

Justice Blacklock and Justice Young delivered the opinion of the Court.

"[P]erhaps the most fundamental individual liberty of our people," Justice Black famously wrote, is "the right of each man to participate in the self-government of his society." In re Winship , 397 U.S. 358, 385, 90 S.Ct. 1068, 25 L.Ed.2d 368 (1970) (Black, J., dissenting). The right to vote makes self-government possible and undergirds the premise that the government has the consent of the governed. This petition for writ of mandamus contends that the Harris County Commissioners Court has stripped more than a million Texans of their right to vote for a commissioner in the 2022 election. According to Relators, the majority of the commissioners court—when redrawing their own precincts—did this to increase the chances that one party will retain control of the court for the next decade. Respondents, by contrast, contend that redistricting combined with staggered elections makes it inevitable that some voters who would have voted in 2022 under an old map will end up voting in 2024 under a new map. They claim that the commissioners court has substantial discretion in drawing the precinct lines, that the reasons for drawing the lines as they did reflect rational considerations (like unifying rather than dividing "communities of interest" within common precincts), and that, in any event, this Court lacks jurisdiction because no Relator has standing and because of other obstacles peculiar to the posture of this litigation.

We deny the petition for writ of mandamus, but we do not do so lightly or summarily. Our decision implies no endorsement, affirmation, or other view of the redrawn map of precincts challenged here. Nor do we suggest that mandamus would never be an appropriate vehicle to resolve this question or ones like it. Our narrow holding is that this mandamus petition, under the circumstances we describe below, cannot go forward under settled precedents that sharply limit judicial authority to intervene in ongoing elections.

To begin, the executive and legislative branches of government are the primary managers of our state's elections. They, no less than the courts, are sworn to uphold the Constitution and the laws. Texas courts do not sit as general overseers of election processes; they sit only to resolve any concrete and justiciable disputes that may arise. A party with such a dispute certainly has access to judicial resolution. But for a court to resolve an election dispute, the court must receive the case early enough to order relief that would not disrupt the larger election.

This Court, like the U.S. Supreme Court, therefore has repeatedly explained that invoking judicial authority in the election context requires unusual dispatch—the sort of speed not reasonably demanded of parties and lawyers when interests less compelling than our society's need for smooth and uninterrupted elections are at stake.¹ Time is particularly of the essence if a lawsuit seeks judicial action that may prevent the election from happening on time. Like the courts themselves, all parties must minimize delays in this context. Avoidable delays, in particular, may be fatal to the courts’ ability to proceed at all.²

Another corollary is likewise true: as the risk of judicial interference with an election rises, so does the duty of the party invoking judicial power to explain with precision how any relief will affect that election and the larger structure of our state's election machinery. At a bare minimum, a party who asks a court to take action that could disrupt the election calendar after the election process has begun has the duty to explain the practical consequences of the requested judicial action. That explanation must contain sufficient detail to allow the Court to weigh the need for the requested relief against the burdens the relief would impose on the election process and on the rights of other Texans.

These principles are not novel. Courts at every level, including the U.S. Supreme Court and this Court, have declined to implement even "seemingly innocuous" alterations to election laws on the eve of an election, let alone after one has begun. Democratic Nat'l Comm. v. Wis. State Legislature , ––– U.S. ––––, 141 S. Ct. 28, 31, 208 L.Ed.2d 247 (2020) (Kavanaugh, J., concurring); see In re Hotze , 627 S.W.3d 642, 646 (2020) ("[C]ourt changes of election laws close in time to the election are strongly disfavored.") (quoting Tex. All. for Retired Ams. v. Hughs , 976 F.3d 564, 567 (5th Cir. 2020) ); see also Republican Nat'l Comm. v. Democratic Nat'l Comm. , ––– U.S. ––––, 140 S. Ct. 1205, 1207, 206 L.Ed.2d 452 (2020) (per curiam) (holding that a lower court errs when it changes election laws on the eve of the election without sufficient showing of constitutional burdens). All parties must move with maximum expedition so that the courts—which also must act quickly when properly called upon—do not themselves contribute to electoral confusion.

Expedition and precision in requesting relief help ensure that courts can never be converted, willingly or otherwise, into a partisan tool for one side or the other. Those requirements reduce the incentives for partisan adversaries to lie in wait with lawsuits that create chaos. To be clear, we do not charge Relators here with any such intention. We simply note that the rules are demanding because such conduct would otherwise go undeterred. Courts must follow the same, exacting standards in all cases.

These principles leave us no option but to deny the petition. The Harris County Commissioners Court held a series of hearings leading up to the passage of the map at issue. That court passed the map on October 28, 2021.³ Relators sued three weeks later, on November 16. The district court held a hearing on November 29 to consider Relators’ request for a temporary restraining order, which the court denied during the hearing. On December 22, at a hearing to consider Relators’ application for a temporary injunction and Respondents’ plea to the jurisdiction, Relators rightly asked the district judge to proceed quickly so that they could appeal. The judge obliged by signing an order granting Respondents’ plea to the jurisdiction at the end of the hearing. Relators then recognized that an interlocutory appeal would leave insufficient time for the courts to resolve the merits and grant them any relief, and so on December 23, they instead filed an original petition for writ of mandamus in this Court.

The time frame is a particularly acute concern. When an election's imminence will likely implicate the judicial limitations on granting relief described above, litigants often have some options to accelerate the process. For example, litigants who choose to proceed in the district court, and file promptly in that court, may respectfully alert that court that, due to the emergency nature of the litigation, they will feel constrained to file a mandamus petition to prevent the loss of their claimed rights if they have not received a ruling by a specified date. If such a filing becomes necessary, the case can come to the appellate courts’ attention sooner. Or if the urgency makes proceeding in a district court impracticable, a litigant with statutory authority to do so may file an original mandamus petition in an appellate court, accompanied by a factual record that establishes the nature of the violation and justifies the requested relief. Such mechanisms may enable courts to address claims without interfering with an impending or ongoing election.

But no amount of expedited briefing or judicial expediency at this point can change the fact that the primary election for 2022 is already in its early stages. It began on November 13 with the opening of the filing period for candidates based on the now-challenged map. That filing period ended on December 13. The period for ballot access has closed. Ballots must be finalized very soon to comply with deadlines for mailing ballots to military and overseas voters. This Court and other Texas courts are duty-bound to respond quickly to urgent cases that warrant expedited proceedings, but even with utmost judicial speed, any relief that we theoretically could provide here would necessarily disrupt the ongoing election process.

Relators do not suggest any relief that could avoid these practical consequences. As far as we can see, they have asked us only to enjoin the use of the map enacted by the commissioners court. But wiping away that map would only leave the preexisting map—one that Relators agree violates federal law because of the disparity in size among the precincts based on a decade of uneven population growth throughout Harris County. Enjoining the current map, the County assures us, would bring dire consequences. The affidavits attached to Respondents’ brief—including affidavits from the Texas Secretary of State's office drawn from contemporaneous litigation—all state that disruptions to the election at this point would be "catastrophic."⁴ Should Relators be successful here, the requested relief could prevent the election from going forward on time and, at the very least, insert a great deal of confusion into this election cycle. Relators do not argue to the contrary.⁵ This is an original mandamus proceeding brought in this Court with a bare record that contains only allegations—some of...