(AFP) – A judge in the closely watched US swing state of Georgia ruled on Tuesday that local election board members must certify vote results, in a decision that could impact the upcoming presidential contest. Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney’s ruling came after a Republican appointee to the election board in Fulton County, which includes large parts of Atlanta, refused earlier this year to certify the results of Georgia’s presidential primary.
Julie Adams, in a lawsuit backed by the America First Policy Institute, a group aligned with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, had sought a judgment from the court that the certification of election results was “discretionary.” McBurney rejected Adams’s claim. “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.”
The judge said there are “some things an election superintendent must do, either in a certain way or by a certain time, with no discretion to do otherwise.” “Certification is one of those things,” he said. “Election superintendents in Georgia have a mandatory fixed obligation to certify election results.” Trump is facing racketeering charges in the southern state over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
The certification case is one of a number of election-related cases that are being heard in courts in Georgia, which is expected to be one of seven key states that will determine the outcome of the November 5 election between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Another case involves a controversial requirement passed by a pro-Trump majority on the Georgia State Election Board that counties manually hand count their ballots.
Georgia officials from both sides of the political aisle say the count is not only superfluous — machines already count the ballots — but also a potential tool to sow doubt by slowing the process and creating space for disinformation. The state election board passed the rule by a three-to-two vote — those in favor being staunch Trump backers praised by the ex-president as “pit bulls” fighting for “victory.”
The Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Party of Georgia sued to block the rule with the Harris campaign’s backing. A Georgia state election official said meanwhile that a record number of early in-person votes had been cast on Tuesday. “As predicted, as of 1pm we have already set an opening day of Early Voting record with 154,505 votes cast in person today, with several hours to go,” Gabriel Sterling said on X. “MASSIVE numbers!” Sterling said the previous first day early voting record was in 2020, when 136,000 votes were cast. Georgia is one of a number of US states that allows voters to cast their ballots in-person before the November election.
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