Court Curbs Minnesota Speech Law: Will This Impact Elections?
A federal appeals court ruled the First Amendment protects a conservative group’s right to argue that certain felons cannot legally vote, blocking Minnesota from prosecuting the claim under its election-speech law. The decision does not erase the statute, but it carves a First Amendment hole in a law that made contested political speech a crime.
What the court decided
- An injunction, not a repeal. The Eighth Circuit reversed a lower court and ordered a preliminary injunction protecting the Minnesota Voters Alliance and its members from enforcement of the law. The ruling issued August 20 in Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Ellison. The statute stays on the books against everyone else.
- The law it reached is broad. Minnesota bars any person, within 60 days of an election, from knowingly transmitting materially false information intended to impede another’s right to vote, a criminal offense. A state that can jail a citizen for a disputed claim about who may vote has made an election-law argument a prosecutable act.
- The panel was unanimous. The 3-0 opinion was written by Judge David Stras and joined by Judges Raymond Gruender and Jonathan Kobes, two Trump appointees and one appointed by George W. Bush.
How it works
The case turns on a genuine legal dispute the state tried to settle with a criminal statute. The Minnesota Voters Alliance reads the state constitution to mean that felons who have left prison but not finished their full sentences remain ineligible to vote. Minnesota’s 2023 Restore the Vote law says otherwise. The Alliance wanted to make its argument publicly inside the 60-day window; the statute exposed it to prosecution for doing so, because the state deems its reading “materially false.”
The court’s answer is that the government cannot criminalize one side of a contested question while blessing its own. Applying strict scrutiny, the standard for content-based speech restrictions, the panel found the law likely fails.
The precedent
Controlling case is Alvarez. The panel leaned on United States v. Alvarez, the 2012 Stolen Valor decision holding that false statements are not, by themselves, outside First Amendment protection. Lies become punishable when tied to concrete harm, such as fraud or defamation, not merely because the state judges them false.
The line the court drew is the key sentence. “The government cannot endorse one view and criminalize the other without implicating the First Amendment,” the opinion states, framing the eligibility of felon voters as exactly the kind of disputed question the state may not resolve with handcuffs.
Remedy is narrow by design. This is a preliminary injunction for the named plaintiffs, not a final judgment striking the law. The merits continue in the district court, and no other group in Minnesota yet holds the same protection.
Why it matters
Election-integrity laws written to police “disinformation” collide with the First Amendment precisely when the underlying facts are contested, and here they were. The state treated its own reading of a felon-voting provision as settled truth, and everyone else’s as a crime. That is the structure the court rejected: not because the Alliance is right about felon eligibility, but because the question is arguable and the government cannot criminalize the losing side of an argument it has appointed itself to judge.
Where things stand
The injunction takes effect for the Alliance while the case proceeds, and the ruling gives other advocacy groups a template to seek the same shield before the midterms. The broader fate of Minnesota’s statute, and of the wave of similar election-speech laws in other states, will be decided as the litigation continues and, quite possibly, at the Supreme Court. The narrow win is that a court has now said a disputed claim about voting law is speech, not a crime.
-The Editors
Liberty · Upstream of the Swamp · August 21, 2026
