A Georgia judge has ruled that county election authorities are prohibited from postponing or rejecting the validation of the election outcomes.
"Georgia's election overseers are legally required to endorse election outcomes, as stated by Judge Robert McBurney in a 11-page judgment. As a result, no election administrator (or board member of elections and registrations) can opt out of certifying or postpone the certification of election results under any circumstances."
Two significant election certification disagreements in this crucial contention state are currently under observation. A decision is yet to be made in a separate case initiated by state and federal Democrats against rules passed by the State Election Board. These new rules could grant local election officials the power to postpone or boycott the certification process altogether.
In his verdict, McBurney stated that while local overseers should examine allegations of miscounts, such investigations do not justify delaying or ignoring certification.
The case was prompted by Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, who petitioned the judge to declare that her responsibilities in endorsing election results were discretionary rather than mandatory.
"If election supervisors were to be given, as the defendant suggests, the authority to act as investigators, prosecutors, jurors, and judges, and refuse to certify election results based on their own conclusions of error or fraud, Georgia voters would be muzzled," McBurney wrote. "Our Constitution and our Election Code do not permit such suppression."
Fulton County has faced legitimate challenges with conducting elections, and earlier this year the State Election Board reprimanded the county and appointed an independent election observer due to problems that arose during the 2020 presidential election. One of these issues included a situation where a group of ballots were accidentally scanned twice during one of the 2020 recounts.
The comprehensive reviews of Georgia’s 2020 election – which included two machine recounts and one hand count – failed to discover evidence of widespread fraud. No proof has surfaced suggesting that tally sheets were manipulated or drop box ballots were removed improperly by couriers, not just in 2020 but in subsequent elections.
Despite the ongoing disputes over election rules, Judge McBurney's ruling clearly outlined that election overseers are legally obligated to endorse election outcomes. In contrast, proposed rules could potentially grant local officials the authority to postpone or boycott the certification process, which would contradict Georgia's constitutional and election code principles.
