Does the complaint allege a violation of the consent decrees or turn on them? No. The claimants, to start with, did not allege that the Secretary had violated the consent decrees or any other federal court order. In the statement of the claim and the prayer for relief, the complaint does not invoke the consent decrees, and indeed it never mentions either consent decree. The most that can be said is that, at one point in the complaint, the claimants mention the Secretary's Directive 2008–101, though not the consent decree.
See Compl. ¶ 18. But that reference was not in the context of alleging that the Secretary had violated a federal court order; it was in the context of alleging that the Secretary had offered one interpretation of the relevant statutes before the election and had offered another interpretation of the statutes after the election when the significance of these provisional-ballot-counting issues had become apparent,
see id. ¶¶ 17–22. Nowhere did the claimants allege that the Secretary, by adopting a different interpretation of the state laws on November 10, had “violated” her prior administrative directive or the court order that “adopt[ed] and annexe[d]” it, 10/24 Order at 1. To read the complaint any other way would suggest that the
defendant, not the claimants, is “the master of [their] complaint.”
NicSand, Inc. v. 3M Co., 507 F.3d 442, 458 (6th Cir.2007) (en banc).