Georgia Election Officials Barred From Delaying 2024 Results

(Bloomberg) -- County election officials across Georgia cannot refuse to certify the results of the 2024 presidential contest, a judge ruled on Tuesday.

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Judge Robert McBurney rebuffed a case brought by Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton County Board of Elections who sought a court order declaring that she has discretion to decide what to do after the polls close. Adams had abstained from certifying a primary contest earlier this year.

Adams’ case is one of multiple lawsuits in the battleground state challenging how the November match-up between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will play out. Adams’ lawsuit is widely seen as an early test of the potential for state and local officials who support Trump to use their authority to undermine the vote counting process if it appears he’s lost again.

McBurney said that the duty of election officials to certify the outcome is “ministerial” and that they can’t refuse to perform that duty “under any circumstance.”

“If election superintendents were, as Plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so — because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud — refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced,” McBurney wrote. “Our Constitution and our Election Code do not allow for that to happen.”

Adams and her attorneys at the America First Policy Institute characterized the decision as a win, pointing to part of McBurney’s order where he said election officials are entitled to “promptly” receive certain election records that they want to see. The judge added that a delay in getting those documents can’t be grounds to refuse to certify results, however.

“Judge McBurney has affirmed that I, as a board member, have a statutory duty to ‘cross-check’ the election returns, procedures, etc. That is where all of this started – when I was denied access to the full range of the election procedures and materials,” Adams said in a statement, referring to her refusal to certify the primary results.

If election officials do have concerns about the November contest, McBurney wrote that they can go through the usual process for challenging ballot counts available to all voters in the state once the results are certified.

(Updated with a statement from Adams and other information.)

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