County election boards in Georgia are not allowed to refuse to certify election results, a state judge ruled Tuesday.
Concerns about fraud or abuse should be addressed in court, the judge said, not by county officials acting unilaterally.
“If election supervisors were free to play the role of investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge, as Plaintiff demands, they would refuse to certify the election results because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud, Georgia’s voters would be silenced. Our Constitution and Election Code do not allow this to happen,” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney said in his order.
After the 2020 election, former President Donald Trump and his allies pressured state officials to block his loss from being certified. Since then, Republican members of the council have used the once-routine process of certifying election results and sending them to the state as a political battleground.
McBurney said the law is clear when it says county officials must “verify” the results. In the footnotes, he said that the word is clear enough.
“For common language users, ‘good’ means an instruction or command: You shall not pass!” he wrote, quoting Gandalf’s famous Lord of the Rings battle cry. “And generally, even lawyers, legislators, and judges interpret the word ‘I will’ as a ‘command word.’
Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, filed the lawsuit, claiming she was required to refuse to certify election results if she believed the results were inaccurate or invalid.
Adams, who a member and regional coordinator Former Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell’s activist group, the Election Integrity Network, abstained on a vote to confirm the early results in Georgia this May. He is one of a growing number of Georgia officials who have refused to certify election results since 2020, worrying election experts that county officials may try and block routine certification of election results under the guise of baseless conspiracy theories.
Adding to those concerns, the Republican-controlled Georgia State Board of Elections voted earlier this year to allow local boards to conduct “reasonable investigations” into election results. Rule has not defined “reasonable inquiry,” to the chagrin of some, a provision that would allow county boards of elections to request large amounts of information and potentially delay or block the certification of results if they see fit.
Georgia’s election officials announced the verdict on Tuesday.
“Great news! He wrote in X. “A judge has ruled that county election board members in Georgia must certify elections. It’s another step in maintaining the guardrails to protect our elections.”