Georgia election officials must certify election results, judge rules – ProPublica

A judge in Georgia ruled this week that members of the county election board cannot block the certification of votes based on suspected fraud or errors.

If the ruling stands, the question arises as to whether local election officials will be allowed to exclude individual voting precincts from the county’s vote count if fraud or error is suspected. A new regulation passed by the state election board appeared to allow such exclusions.

If county election board members were “free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and therefore refuse to certify the election results based on a unilateral finding of error or fraud, Georgia voters would be silenced.” said Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in the ruling. “Our constitution and our electoral law do not allow this.”

The ruling follows a lawsuit filed by Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton County Board of Elections who is also part of a right-wing group that has raised doubts about the integrity of U.S. elections. Adams’ attorney argued in court that the new election rule empowers county board members to refuse to certify votes they suspect were tainted by fraud or error. This power, the lawyer argued, extended to the exclusion of entire electoral districts if they found something in the declarations that seemed suspicious to them.

A ProPublica investigation found that if Adam’s interpretation of the rule had stood, election officials in just a handful of rural counties could have excluded enough votes to influence the outcome of the presidential race. After former President Donald Trump lost reelection in 2020, Republican lawmakers in Georgia began overhauling county election boards one by one, sometimes ousting Democrats and filling the election boards with Trump supporters. For example, election boards in Spalding, Troup and Ware counties are now run by election skeptics, including a man who called President Joe Biden a “pedophile” and made sexually demeaning comments about Vice President Kamala Harris. If the judge had accepted Adams’ reasoning, those county executives would have had the power to exclude the ballots of Democratic counties that cast roughly 8,000 more votes for Biden than for Trump in 2020.

The chairman of the Spalding County Board of Elections declined to comment to ProPublica this month. Ware County’s chief executive did not respond to requests for comment. Troup County Board Chairman William Stump said he doesn’t believe anyone on the board is overtly partisan. “Everyone is about getting the numbers right and getting them out on time,” Stump said.

McBurney’s decision made it clear that excluding votes from Democratic districts was not permitted. “If, in the course of their recruitment, counting and investigation, a board member discovers what they believe appears to be fraud or systemic error, they must still count all votes,” McBurney wrote. The proper path forward is for the board member to “report their concerns of fraud or error to the appropriate district attorney,” as required by Georgia law, rather than undertake the work of professional investigators themselves.

When interested parties want to challenge the result, the route has long been to challenge the election in court. “Importantly, election campaigns take place in open court under the watchful eyes of a judge and the public,” McBurney wrote. “One side’s allegations of fraud are tested by the opposing side in this open court – rather than being quietly “decided” by “county board members” outside the public sphere, resulting in votes being excluded from the final count without due process .” has granted these voters.”

The ruling is the latest development in a legal battle over whether county election board members have the power to delay or block the certification of election results – a power that experts have warned could affect the outcome of November’s presidential election. However, many of these experts emphasize that certification has long been interpreted as a voluntary obligation of election board members.

Much of that litigation was driven by Adams, the Fulton County board member and regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network, a right-wing organization led by a lawyer that tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. Adams voted against certifying the March presidential primary and opposed certifying the March presidential primary. She said she needed more information to investigate the results, but was overruled by the Democratic majority. She then sued the board and the county elections director, asking that the court find that her certification duties, among other responsibilities, were “actually discretionary and not ministerial in nature.”

Then Adams began working behind the scenes to change the rules for certifying elections in Georgia, pushing activists to propose a rule for adoption by the state’s election board that would limit the authority of county board members to cast votes they deemed suspect not confirming would expand significantly, as ProPublica reported. When this rule was first presented to the state election board, members rejected it as illegal. But in August, after a moderate Republican member was forced off the board and replaced, the new majority, each praising Trump by name at a rally, adopted a version of the rule almost identical to the one the previous majority had found be illegal.

In back-to-back court hearings in early October, McBurney heard Adams’ case as well as a similar case pitting the Democratic and Republican national committees against each other over whether certification of election results was mandatory. McBurney’s ruling only directly addressed Adams’ lawsuit.

Adams had also asked in her lawsuit that the court give her more access to election-related documents and information before certifying the vote. McBurney ruled that she should be granted this information, but the late delivery did not allow her to refuse to certify the election results.

“This lawsuit was filed to ensure that Ms. Adams has access to all of the election materials she needs, to ensure that Fulton County’s elections are free from irregularities, and to be able to challenge irregularities in the election results,” Richard said Lawson, an attorney for Adams and the Center for Litigation at the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank. “This order protects their rights on both counts.”

The ruling makes clear that the options county executives can use to challenge election results they believe are suspect are the same as before the lawsuit and do not include a delay in certification.

“I am confident that access to the entire election process will allow every board member to know and rely on the true and accurate results before certification occurs,” Adams said in a statement provided by Lawson.

Kristin Nabers, the state director of All Voting is Local in Georgia, a voting rights organization, said in a statement: “Georgia voters won today against a shameless attempt by a prominent election denier to overturn the longstanding “To change routine duty of certification into a discretionary decision for election officials if they don’t like the election results.”

Experts believe the ruling will be appealed, meaning a final decision could come much closer to the election.

Neither Adams nor Lawson responded via email to questions about whether they planned to appeal.

McBurney did not issue a ruling in the second case he heard with Adams on another new rule that experts had warned could be used to disrupt the election through a poorly defined “appropriate inquiry” into tight certification deadlines is delayed. However, McBurney wrote that a county board member must “certify the election results of his or her jurisdiction by the state’s deadline.”

Legal battles over the State Election Board’s rules continue. On Tuesday, in a separate case, McBurney heard arguments from the Cobb County Board of Elections that claimed several other new rules exceeded the state board’s authority. That night, he issued an order blocking implementation of a rule requiring poll workers to count ballots by hand, warning that doing so could lead to “administrative chaos.” On Wednesday, another judge heard a similar Republican-led lawsuit against the state elections board over the new rules. The board has faced at least seven lawsuits over its recent rule changes and related actions.

McBurney signaled impatience with efforts to change election rules in his ruling, writing that “key players in the state’s election management system have increasingly sought to impose their own rules and approaches that are either at odds with the letter of these laws or completely contradict them.” .” .”