The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a lawsuit on Thursday that sought to require Arizona’s governor to call a special special election to fill the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Republican Martha McSally.

John McCain was reelected to the U.S. Senate for a 6th term in 2016. However, soon after his reelection, McCain was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. In May 2018, Arizona Governor Douglas Ducey signed an amendment to Arizona’s congressional vacancy statute into law, which stated that if a Senate seat became vacant 150 days or less before a primary election, the people of Arizona would not be able to cast a vote to fill the vacancy until the following general election two years later. As a result, the Governor was tasked with appointing an individual of the same political party as the individual vacating office. Senator McCain died on August 25, 2018 with over four year remaining in his Senate term. Pursuant to the new amendment, Governor Ducey appointed former Senator Jon Kyl to serve as Senator of Arizona until the winner of the November 2020 election assumed office. In December 2018, Kyl announced that he would resign, allowing a subsequent appointee to serve the full two years of the 116th Congress. After Kyl’s resignation, Governor Ducey appointed Martha McSally to fill the vacant seat.

A group of registered Arizona voters sued, alleging that Governor Ducey and Senator Kyl violated their constitutional rights. In the unanimous opinion, Judge Milan Smith rejected the plaintiffs’ constitutional challenges, stating that “we interpret the Seventeenth Amendment… to confer at least as much temporal discretion upon the States as was exercised by Arizona in A.R.S. § 16-222 as applied to the vacancy created by Senator McCain’s death… we further conclude that the vacancy election timing challenged here does not impermissibly burden the right to vote under the First or Fourteenth Amendments.”