In 2021, Georgia enacted the Election Integrity Act, which included a provision prohibiting the distribution of gifts, including food and drink, within 150 feet of a polling place or 25 feet of a voter in line. Progressive advocacy groups challenged the law, arguing that handing out items to voters is a form of expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment and that the buffer zones were content-based restrictions. The district court initially denied relief but later granted a preliminary injunction against the 25-foot line buffer, finding it failed strict scrutiny. However, the district court did not apply the rigorous facial-challenge analysis required by the Supreme Court's recent decision in Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, which mandates a comprehensive review of a law's applications before declaring it unconstitutional on its face.
The Eleventh Circuit held that it could not address the merits of the First Amendment challenge because the district court failed to apply the correct legal standard. The court emphasized that the plaintiffs brought a facial challenge, which requires an inquiry into how the law works in all of its applications, not just the specific activities of the plaintiffs. Citing Moody v. NetChoice, the court explained that a facial challenge succeeds only when the law's unconstitutional applications substantially outweigh its constitutional ones. The district court erred by focusing narrowly on the plaintiffs' line-relief efforts and the government's general justifications without charting the full range of activities covered by the gift ban or weighing the varying First Amendment protections across those different applications. The court declined to perform this complex analysis itself in the first instance, noting that facial challenges are difficult to win and require a systematic assessment of the law's scope.
The district court's injunction is vacated, meaning the Georgia gift ban remains in effect pending further proceedings. The case is remanded for the district court to conduct a new analysis that charts the full scope of the gift ban's applications and weighs constitutional versus unconstitutional uses under the Moody framework. This process may result in the law being upheld, partially invalidated, or fully struck down depending on the scope of its unconstitutional applications.