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In one of the latest legal fights brewing ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Democrats in Georgia have filed a lawsuit to prevent chaos and confusion in the battleground state. The petition against the State Election Board was sparked by two rules passed by the Republican-majority board regarding election certification, a process that should be straightforward but that the GOP has sought to complicate.
The petition for relief, filed Monday in Fulton County Superior Court, seeks a court declaration that the rules are invalid, laying out the issue this way:
Three months before the November 5 general election, Georgia’s State Election Board (“SEB”) has attempted to upend the required process for certifying election results. Through rulemaking, SEB has attempted to turn the straightforward and mandatory act of certification — i.e. confirmation of the accurate tabulation of the votes cast — into a broad license for individual board members to hunt for purported election irregularities of any kind, potentially delaying certification and displacing longstanding (and court-supervised) processes for addressing fraud.
The petition explains that under these two new rules, election officials in the state would have to (1) conduct a “reasonable inquiry” prior to certification and (2) allow individual county board members “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections.”
One problem with the rules is that they suggest that certifying the election results is a discretionary process. But it’s a mandatory one, and any fraud or misconduct allegations are meant to be resolved in court through legal challenges, not by county boards during the counting process.
“To the extent either rule does allow election officials to delay certification or not certify — as the rules’ drafters avowedly intend — it is invalid,” the petition argues, seeking to “prevent chaos in November” by clarifying the issue now.
Certifying election results shouldn’t be a contentious issue. But Republicans backed by Donald Trump have made it one recently, most notably culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol following the 2020 election that Trump lost to Joe Biden. Whatever the results of the coming election, a court order that makes clear the uncontroversial process of counting ballots should make it a less chaotic one.
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