There is a safety issue with fires caused by static electricity. This is most often seen with women wearing synthetic clothing who get back into the vehicle in the winter and then get a fresh charge when they step out to remove the nozzle. Hand touches nozzle and the vapor cloud goes boom. This also used to be a problem with cell phones with retractable antennas and you still see the warning signs for them from time to time.
It is truly amazing what total nonsense people will believe in order to justify laws (or really anything else which in their view needs justifying). You can literally drive around 48 states and see that this never happens. It's not a thing. The Mythbusters even did an episode on it years ago and they decided it's not a thing; they were simply unable to get fumes to combust using static electricity, let alone cell phones.
I think you might be remembering this Mythbusters episode backwards; they determined that it wasn't cell phones causing ignition and was in fact static electricity.
