The federal appeals court based in Denver has agreed with a trial judge’s decision dismissing a lawsuit that claimed the 2020 election was rigged by Dominion Voting Systems, Facebook and others.

Eight voters from across the country filed a lawsuit after the 2020 presidential election alleging various types of election interference and seeking $160 billion in damages. In April 2021, U.S. Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter dismissed the case after finding the plaintiffs had no standing, which requires a specific injury attributable to the defendants.

Claims of election fraud have failed to withstand scrutiny. The Associated Press reported in December that out of more than 25 million votes cast in six battleground states in 2020 – not including Colorado – there were fewer than 500 cases of voter fraud, far too few to influence the outcome. 

Neureiter also imposed sanctions on the lawyers who brought the lawsuit, labeling the unsubstantiated allegations of fraud as “the stuff of which violent insurrections are made.”

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit upheld Neureiter’s dismissal order on Friday, without addressing the specific claims in the lawsuit.

“Accordingly, no matter how strongly plaintiffs believe that defendants violated voters’ rights in the 2020 election, they lack standing to pursue this litigation unless they identify an injury to themselves that is distinct or different from the alleged injury to other registered voters,” wrote Judge Timothy M. Tymkovich in the panel’s May 27 order.

Gary D. Fielder, the lawyer who filed the appeal, maintained on his podcast on April 5 that “everything that we allege in this complaint has come true.”

“Whether we’re good lawyers or not is really irrelevant,” Fielder added.

In their court filing to the 10th Circuit, the attorneys for defendants Dominion, Facebook and the Center for Tech and Civic Life, argued that a lawsuit purporting to represent all registered voters in the United States, regardless of whether they actually voted in 2020, indicated an “obvious” lack of a specific injury necessary to establish legal standing.

“Their brief on appeal reprises the same irrelevant, baseless, and frivolous contentions that the district court carefully considered and decisively rejected,” they wrote about the plaintiffs.

The case is O’Rourke et al. v. Dominion Voting Systems, Inc. et al.