Georgia local officials have duty to certify election, state judge rules

By Luc Cohen

(Reuters) -A Georgia judge has ruled that local election officials must certify results, in a win for Democrats concerned that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's allies may seek to sow chaos by delaying vote counts after the Nov. 5 election.

In an Oct. 14 ruling, Judge Robert McBurney in Fulton County Superior Court in Atlanta denied a request from a Republican member of the county's election board to declare that she had discretion to decline to certify the results if there were concerns about the process.

"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."

Julie Adams, the board member who brought the case, said in a statement she was "gratified" by another section of McBurney's ruling stating that county governments should make information about the election available to board members like Adams.

The Democratic National Committee had intervened in the case, writing in a Sept. 27 brief that Adams' request would "convert the straightforward act of certification into a broad license for individual board members to hunt for purported election irregularities."

In a statement on Tuesday, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris' campaign said, "Democrats remain ready to stand up and make sure every voter can cast their ballot knowing it will count."

Georgia is one of seven closely contested states that are expected to determine the outcome of the presidential race between Harris and Trump.

Republicans and their allies have filed dozens of lawsuits in battleground states seeking to purge voter rolls and limit overseas or mail-in voting. They say those efforts are designed to restore "election integrity" after the 2020 election, which Trump insists, falsely, was marred by fraud.

Democrats and legal experts argue that Republicans are seeking to sow doubt in the process and lay the groundwork to challenge a potential Trump loss. Trump's allies filed more than 60 lawsuits after the 2020 election seeking, unsuccessfully, to overturn his loss to Democratic President Joe Biden.

U.S. election counting is decentralized, with local officials responsible for tabulating results in their precincts before they can be certified at the state level.

In his ruling, McBurney wrote that Adams and other local officials are responsible for counting results and taking notes of any concerns - such as more votes being received than there are voters in the precinct.

But he wrote that local officials' duty was to report any such problems to prosecutors for further investigation, not to delay certification and look into the issues themselves.

Separately, McBurney earlier this month heard a case brought by the Democratic Party over changes made by Georgia's Republican-controlled state election board that empower county board members to investigate results and examine election-related documents before certifying them.

Democrats urged the judge to either nullify the rules or clarify that the measures cannot interfere with the certification of the election by the Nov. 12 deadline. McBurney has not yet ruled in that case.

The Democrats have also sued to block the state election board's Sept. 20 decision to require a hand count of ballots.

(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler)