A federal appeals court struck down a lawsuit against the Maryland State Board of Elections filed by two groups questioning the validity of voter records and election procedures.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit agreed with a lower court that the plaintiffs lacked standing and failed to prove they suffered any harm.

The plaintiffs, Maryland Election Integrity LLC and Missouri-based United Sovereign Americans, failed to show a group member suffered a “concrete” violation of their voting rights. Cases need to be based on actual legal violations not “hypothetical or conjectural” ones, wrote Judge James Andrew Wynn, citing case law.

The 2024 lawsuit alleged the state elections board had “lost control of the voting system,” failed to keep accurate voter rolls, used voting machines with error rates beyond the legal threshold, and denied the plaintiff’s requests for election reports through Maryland’s public information laws.

The plaintiffs wanted the court to bar the state from certifying the 2024 elections until their claims had been satisfied.

Cases like this have been filed in courtrooms across the country following President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss and after an angry mob backing Trump tried to stop the election certification.

The Maryland lawsuit was the first of many challenges filed by one plaintiff in this case, United Sovereign Americans, described on its website as “an organization of citizen volunteers working to ensure valid Constitutional elections.”

Government transparency and democracy advocates assert that voting errors are rare and that Maryland elections have been upheld up as a national model.

The Maryland State Board of Elections did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown called the judge’s decision “a victory for all Maryland voters.”

“I am proud of our Office’s role in ensuring that special interest groups cannot use arguments based on misinformation to disenfranchise Marylanders,” Brown said in a statement, “and I am grateful that the Fourth Circuit has safeguarded our courtrooms against attempts to unjustifiably hinder free and fair elections, the cornerstone of our democracy.”

Attorney Bruce Castor Jr. represents United Sovereign Americans and filed the appeal. Had he been involved earlier in the Maryland case, he said, he would have done things differently, but the deadline to file was fast approaching.

“It was frustrating to stand there and get torpedoed by the judges,” Castor said. “I couldn’t really blame them, because I also thought that we were not in the best position.”

If Castor’s name sounds familiar, that’s because he defended Trump during the Republican’s second impeachment trial as the U.S. Senate considered whether Trump incited an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.

Castor is considering how to proceed with his raft of lawsuits under a new Trump Administration and whether a new U.S. Attorney General would weigh in on election cases like his.

Co-plaintiff Katherine Strauch Sullivan, who runs Maryland Election Integrity, said she was disappointed in the opinion and that “a loss in court does not equate to a loss in principle.”

She asserted her group was not “re-litigating” an election. Now that Trump has won the election, she said, “We can now actually say we don’t care who wins.”

Sullivan said she and her colleagues will continue to hold the state and local boards of elections accountable, but will no longer pursue this particular case.

“That doesn’t mean that in the future there might be something else,” she said.

This story has been updated with the Maryland Attorney General’s statement.