How Many Times Can a Complaint Be Amended?

This post aims to answer a simple question: what is the highest number of amendments to a complaint that has ever been allowed by a court in the United States?

A bit of background first. This post concerns civil litigation, where plaintiffs typically file a complaint setting forth various causes of action against defendants who have allegedly wronged them. These complaints are often amended. Sometimes plaintiffs add or remove parties. Plaintiffs may also add or remove causes of action or factual allegations in support of their causes of action. A defendant may move to dismiss a complaint, and if they succeed, the court may grant the plaintiff leave to file an amended complaint. Granting leave to amend at least once is common--unless a defendant has clearly demonstrated that a plaintiff's case is completely futile, a court will likely give the plaintiff another shot.

While many cases I've litigated have involved amended, second amended, or even fourth amended complaints, I was curious about the maximum number of amendments courts have allowed. A first amended complaint isn't too hard for a plaintiff to get. But when a court is confronted with a complaint that has been drafted and redrafted multiple times, the probability that the court will give a plaintiff yet another chance decreases.

From my exhaustive research (searching for "tenth amended complaint" and increasing the numbers until I could find no further results), it appears that the most amended complaint on record was amended twenty-two times.  The case is Mirarchi v. Boockvar, and it's a recent one--with the original complaint filed on January 12, 2021 in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (case no. 5:21-CV-00126). A publicly-accessible link to the docket is here.

I've answered the question I set out to investigate, but I dug into the case itself, as I was curious about what would give rise to so many amendments. For those of you brave enough to dive into that nonsense, read on:

The original complaint can be viewed here. It's one of the numerous lawsuits filed in the wake of the 2020 presidential election that alleged the election had been stolen as a result of massive voter fraud. Mirarchi's allegations start off as readable, but quickly veer off on a tangent in which he claims that the total number of votes that Biden received was "interconnected" with "the Golden Ratio Squared, 2.61803399, and a Reconstruction Cost Value, 601118," which had allegedly been used against Mirarchi in a separate litigation matter involving building appraisal numbers (which appears to be this case). From there, things only get more complicated, as Mirarchi claims that calculations using these numbers end up equaling Biden's total number of votes, thereby revealing fraud.

For example, here's one of the paragraphs:

Here's another:

Mirarchi wraps up these mathematical allegations with a reference to widely and repeatedly discredited allegations by Sidney Powell which she now argues no reasonable person would believe as she tries to escape liability in a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems. Mirarchi's causes of action include election fraud, treason, RICO, and a 42 USC § 1983 claim for violation of his constitutional rights.

The circumstances behind the amendments to this complaint are unclear. For several weeks in January and February 2021, Mirarchi filed further amended versions of his complaint on a near-daily basis, culminating in a Twenty-First Amended Complaint that was filed on February 12, 2021. At that point the court ordered Mirarchi to combine his allegations into a Final Amended Complaint, after which no further amendments would be permitted. The Plaintiff filed that Final Amended Complaint (the twenty-second amended complaint, and the twenty-third iteration of the document) on March 3, 2021.

A motion to dismiss was filed by several of the county defendants on April 26, 2021. The Court has ordered other defendants to respond by May 26 and has granted leave for federal defendants to respond by July 16, 2021. Accordingly, it may be some time before we see whether a Twenty-Third Amended Complaint ends up getting filed.

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Wall Street Journal Praises Judicial Ignorance of Statistical Methods

From yesterday's Wall Street Journal editorial page covering yesterday's oral arguments in Gill v. Whitford, a case that involved a challenge to alleged gerrymandering:

[Chief Justice John Roberts] zeroed in on risks for the credibility of the judiciary if the Supreme Court invalidates a state electoral map on purely political grounds for the first time. His reference to EG is to a political science standard offered by the plaintiffs as a test of when an electoral map is too partisan.

. . .

Chief Justice: “It is just not, it seems, a palatable answer to say the ruling was based on the fact that EG was greater than 7%. That doesn’t sound like language in the Constitution.” . . .

[Plaintiffs' Attorney, Paul] Smith: “If you let this go, if you say this is—we’re not going to have a judicial remedy for this problem, in 2020, you’re going to have a festival of copycat gerrymandering the likes of which this country has never seen.

And it may be that you can protect the Court from seeming political, but the country is going to lose faith in democracy big time because voters are going to be like—everywhere are going to be like the voters in Wisconsin and, no, it really doesn’t matter whether I vote.”

Chief Justice: “No, but you’re going to take this—the whole point is you’re taking these issues away from democracy and you’re throwing them into the courts pursuant to, and it may be simply my educational background, but I can only describe as sociological gobbledygook.”

Gerrymanders are unsightly, but worse would be the sight of federal judges becoming political arbiters of every electoral map based on evidence that voters are likely to conclude is itself partisan.

An eye-opening Twitter thread by Steven Mazie illustrating how Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Gorsuch appeared to lack knowledge of the statistical methodology involved paints Chief Justice Roberts' comment as more disturbing than the quippy Editorial Board lets on. While "gobbledygook" is a fun word, reminiscent of "argle bargle" and "pure applesauce" of old, the implications of the comment are that the Court -- the last resort for challenging (often-complex) gerrymandering schemes -- should decline to do so because the methods involved are too complicated and potentially subject to partisan manipulation. Jesse Wegman at the New York Times' editorial page covers Smith's response, which summarizes this problem:

“The problem in this area is if you don’t do it, it is locked up,” Mr. Smith said. “You are the only institution in the United States that can solve this problem just as democracy is about to get worse because of the way gerrymandering is getting so much worse.”

Gerrymanders are more than "unsightly" as the Journal describes. The contorted and bizarre-looking voting districts that gerrymandering creates may result in disenfranchisement of voters along party and racial lines. They threaten representative democracy. The Journal's and Chief Justice's implication that a lack of understanding of statistical methods is enough of a barrier to let this threat go unchallenged is concerning.

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Charged With a Crime? Don't Accept Interview Requests

The Des Moines Register reports:

A Des Moines woman has been arrested on suspicion of voting twice this month in the general election, police and court records show. 

Terri Lynn Rote, 55, was booked into the Polk County Jail about 3:40 p.m. Thursday on a first-degree election misconduct charge, which is a Class D felony. 

Rote, a registered Republican, reportedly cast an early voting ballot at the Polk County Election Office, 120 Second Ave., and another ballot at a county satellite voting location in Des Moines, according to a Des Moines police report.

Rote chose not to exercise her right to remain silent. From Iowa Public Radio:

"I wasn't planning on doing it twice, it was spur of the moment," says Rote. "The polls are rigged."

It appears that Rote made this comment after she was charged and released, as the Iowa Public Radio story indicates that it was updated to include Rote's statement. The report goes on to quote Polk County Attorney John Sarcone who confirms that cases of voter fraud are "very rare."

KCCI Des Moines reports that police were able to determine that Rote had voted twice by comparing signatures on election ballots. Rote's admission to media outlets that she voted twice will probably prove helpful to the prosecution's case against her as well.

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