County election boards in Georgia are not allowed to refuse to certify election results, a state judge ruled Tuesday.
Concerns about fraud or abuse are to be settled in court, the judge said, not by county officials acting unilaterally.
“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. Our Constitution and our Election Code do not allow for that to happen,” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney said in his order.
In the wake of the 2020 election, President Donald Trump and his allies pressured county officials to block the certification of his loss. Since then, Republican members of the boards have used the once-routine process of approving election results and sending them on to the state as a political battleground.
McBurney said the law is clear when it says county officials "shall" certify the results. In the footnotes, he said the word was quite clear.
"To users of common parlance, 'shall' connotes instruction or command: You shall not pass!" he wrote, quoting Gandalf's famous battle cry from "The Lord of the Rings."
"And, generally, even lawyers, legislators, and judges, construe 'shall' as 'a word of command,'" he continued.
Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, had gone to court claiming she was required to refuse to certify the election results if she believed the results were incorrect or unreliable.
Adams, who is a member and the regional coordinator of former Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell’s activist group Election Integrity Network, abstained from voting to certify primary results in Georgia this May. She is one of a growing number of Georgia officials who have refused to certify election results since 2020, worrying election experts that county officials might try to block the routine certification of election results in the name of baseless conspiracy theories.
Adding to those concerns, the Republican-controlled Georgia State Election Board voted this year to allow local boards to conduct “reasonable inquiry” into election results. The rule did not define “reasonable inquiry,” worrying some that the rule would allow county election boards to request huge amounts of information and potentially delay or block certification of results if they see fit.
Georgia election officials celebrated Tuesday's ruling.
"Great news!" Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer in the Georgia secretary of state's office, wrote on X. "The judge ruled that county election board members in Georgia MUST certify elections. Another step in keeping to guardrails in place to safeguard our elections."
The ruling came on the first day of in-person early voting in Georgia, a key battleground state in the presidential race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said 234,000 voters had cast their ballots as of 3:30 p.m. ET, a daily record.
