The Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Democratic Party of Georgia have sued the state election board, in a move supported by Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign.
Filed on Monday, the lawsuit seeks to challenge a new rule approved weeks earlier that gives local officials more power to investigate votes after election day - authorizing any member on a county board of election "to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections prior to certification of results."
The new rule also requires the board of elections in each county to meet no later than 3pm on the Friday after the election to compare the total number of unique voter ID numbers in each precinct with the number of total ballots cast in the precinct. Votes in each precinct can't be counted until the investigation is resolved. If the results cannot be reconciled, the board is then authorized to "determine a method to compute the votes justly."
"If the board found votes that were made illegally, they should not be counted," said Election Board member Janice Johnston, a Republican.
Democrats contend that "chaos" will ensue in November if the new rules are allowed to stand.
The lawsuit claims that the new rules will give local election officials broad license to "hunt for purported election irregularities of any kind, potentially delaying certification and displacing longstanding (and court-supervised) processes for addressing fraud."
The Republican-controlled State Election Board has moved aggressively to implement new procedures ahead of the election, which they say gives local boards the power to conduct a "reasonable inquiry" into elections before certifying them.
According to the lawsuit, the new rules create the impression that local election officials have discretionary power over certifying election results.
Members of the board who voted to pass the new rules said that they would not permit officials to ignore deadlines for certification set by state law. But the lawsuit notes that some local election officials in Georgia have already sought to delay or refuse certification, and that the new measures add to a legal uncertainty that undermines the entire election process across the state.
“These novel requirements introduce substantial uncertainty in the postelection process and — if interpreted as their drafters have suggested — invite chaos by establishing new processes at odds with existing statutory duties,” the lawsuit argues. -Seattle Times
The lawsuit asks the court to clearly state that certification is mandatory and cannot be delayed by election officials (which is hilarious, considering the country-wide, multi-day delays in Democrat strongholds that began happening with the 2020 US election).
The suit also claims that delaying certification could also result in "mass disenfranchisement of eligible, registered Georgians."
"The three members Donald Trump called his ‘pit bulls’ for ‘victory’ disagree, and they’re determined to establish a new power of not certifying an election result should their preferred candidate lose — as he did in 2020," said Rep. Nikema Williams, chair of the Democratic Party of Georgia, referring to praise heaped on members of the State Election Board by the former president.
The election integrity rules unsurprisingly came under fire from GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who claimed that the last-minute changes were undermining confidence in elections.
"Activists seeking to impose last-minute changes in election procedures outside of the legislative process undermine voter confidence and burden election workers," he said in a statement. "Misguided attempts by the State Election Board will delay election results and undermine chain of custody safeguards. Georgia voters reject this 11th-hour chaos, and so should the unelected members of the State Election Board."
