Judge from Georgia ruled this week that members of county election commissions may not block the certification of votes based on suspicion of fraud or error.
The ordinance, if it goes into effect, raises the question of whether local election officials would be allowed to exclude individual precincts from the overall results of a county’s vote if they suspect fraud or error. A new rule passed by the State Election Commission appeared to allow such exceptions.
If county election commissioners were “free to act as investigators, prosecutors, jurors and judges, and thereby — because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud — refuse to certify the results of an election, the voters of Georgia would be silenced,” the county’s Supreme Court judge said. Fulton Robert McBurney wrote in the ruling. “Our Constitution and our Electoral Code do not allow this.”
The ruling is based on 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 questioned the integrity of US elections. Adams’ attorney argued in court that the new election rule gives county board members the right to refuse to certify votes they suspect are tainted by fraud or error. These powers, the lawyer argued, extended to excluding the votes of entire precincts if they found something suspicious in the voting results.
An examination by ProPublica found that if the interpretation of the Adams rule had been upheld, election officials in only a few rural districts could have excluded enough votes to affect the outcome of the presidential race. After former President Donald Trump lost his 2020 re-election bid, Republican lawmakers in Georgia began an effort to reform county election boards one by one, sometimes taking seats away from Democrats and stacking boards with Trump supporters. Election boards in Spaulding, Troup and Ware counties, for example, are now headed by election skeptics, including one man who called President Joe Biden a “pedophile” and made disparaging comments about Vice President Kamala Harris. If the judge accepted Adams’ argument, those precincts would have the power to exclude ballots from Democratic precincts 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. The chairman of the Ware County Board did not respond to requests for comment. William Stump, chairman of the Troup County Board, said he doesn’t think any of the board members are outspoken supporters. “It’s everyone’s concern to get the numbers right and get them on time,” Stump said.
McBurney’s ruling made it clear that the exclusion of Democratic precinct votes would not be allowed. “If during the canvassing, counting and investigation” a council member “discovers what appears to her to be fraud or a systemic error, she must still count all the votes,” McBurney wrote. The proper course of action for a board member would be to “report concerns of fraud or error to the “appropriate district attorney,” as stated in Georgia law, rather than doing the work of professional investigators herself.
If interested parties want to challenge the result, the long-standing way is to challenge the election in court. “It is important that electoral contests take place in open court, under the watchful eye of the judge and the public,” McBurney wrote. “Claims of fraud on the one hand are tested by the opposite side in this open court, rather than being silently ‘taken’ by county councilors out of the public space, resulting in votes being excluded from the final tally without due process. allowed these voters.”
The ruling is the latest development in a legal battle over whether members of county election commissions have the power to delay or block the certification of election results, which experts have warned could affect the outcome of November’s presidential election. Many of these experts emphasize, however, that certification has long been interpreted as a non-discretionary duty for members of the election commission.
Much of that legal battle was waged by Adams, a Fulton County board member and regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network, a right-wing organization led by attorney who tried to help Trump repeal elections in Georgia in 2020. Going against more than a century of legal precedent, Adams voted against certification presidential primaries in Marchsaying she needed more information to investigate the results, but the Democratic majority outvoted her. She then sued the board and the county election directorasking the court to find that her certification duties, among other duties, “are effectively discretionary rather than ministerial.”
Then, behind the scenes, Adams began working to change Georgia’s election certification rules, pushing activists to get the State Board of Elections to pass a rule that would have greatly expanded the authority of county board members not to certify votes they deemed suspicious. as reported by ProPublica. When the rule was first brought before the State Board of Elections, members rejected it as illegal. However, in August, after one moderate Republican was forced out of the board and replaced, a new majority, each Trump was praised by name at the rallyconveyed a variant of the rule almost identical to that previous majority found illegal.
In early October trials, McBurney addressed the Adams case, as well as a similar case in which the Democratic and Republican National Committees faced off over whether the certification of the election results was binding. The McBurney ruling addressed only Adams’ direct claim.
Adams also asked in her lawsuit that the court give her greater access to documents and information related to the election before the vote is certified. McBurney ruled that this information should be provided to her, but the delay in receiving it did not allow her to withdraw from certifying the election results.
“This lawsuit was filed to ensure that Ms. Adams had access to all of the election materials she needed to ensure that the Fulton County election was conducted without irregularities and to be able to challenge the election irregularities,” said Richard Lawson, an attorney. . for Adams and the Center for Litigation at the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-allied think tank. “This order preserves her rights in both respects.”
The ruling makes it clear that county board members can challenge election results they believe are suspicious, the same as going to court, and not include delaying certification.
“I believe that access to the entire election process will allow every board member to know and have confidence in the true and accurate results before it comes time for certification,” Adams said in Lawson’s statement.
Christine Nabers, Georgia state director of All Voting is Local, a voting rights organization, said in a statement: “Georgia voters today won against a shameless attempt by a notorious voter to turn the longstanding, routine duty of approval into a discretionary decision for election officials when they don’t like the election results.”
Experts expect the decision to be appealed, meaning a final decision could be made much closer to the election.
Neither Adam nor Lawson responded to questions by email about whether they plan to appeal.
McBurney did not rule in a second case he heard with Adams on another new rule that experts warned could be used to disrupt elections by dragging an ill-defined “reasonable inquiry” after strict certification deadlines. However, McBurney wrote that a county council member “must” certify the election results of his jurisdiction” before the state’s term ends.
Court battles over State Election Commission rules continue. On Tuesday, McBurney heard arguments from the Cobb County Board of Elections in another case arguing that a number of other new regulations exceed the authority of the state board. that night he issued an order blocking enforcement of a rule requiring election workers to manually count ballots, warning that it could lead to “administrative chaos.” On Wednesday, another judge heard a similar lawsuit led by a Republican against the State Election Commission over the new rules. My board faced at least seven lawsuits regarding recent rule changes and related actions.
In his ruling, McBurney expressed impatience with attempts to change the election rules, writing that “key players in the state’s election management system are increasingly trying to impose their own rules and approaches that either contradict the letter of these laws or completely contradict them. .”
Heather Vogel filed a report.
