by Doug Bock Clark

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A Georgia judge ruled this week that county election board members cannot block the certification of votes based on suspicions of fraud or error.

The ruling, if it stands, puts to rest the question of whether local election officials would be allowed to throw out individual precincts from county vote totals if they suspect fraud or error. A new rule adopted by the State Election Board appeared to allow such exclusions.

If county election board members were “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,” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in the ruling. “Our Constitution and our Election Code do not allow for that to happen.”

The ruling stems from a lawsuit brought by Julie Adams, a Republican member of Fulton County’s election board who is also part of a right-wing group that has raised doubts about the integrity of U.S. elections. Adams’ lawyer argued in court that the new election rule empowered county board members to refuse to certify votes they suspected of being tainted by fraud or error. This power, the lawyer argued, extended all the way to excluding entire precincts’ votes if they found something they considered suspicious in the returns.

A ProPublica examination found that if Adams’ interpretation of the rule had stood, election officials in just a handful of rural counties could have excluded enough votes to impact the outcome of the presidential race. After former President Donald Trump lost his reelection bid in 2020, Republican legislators in Georgia launched efforts to overhaul county election boards one at a time, sometimes unseating Democrats and stacking the boards with Trump backers. Election boards in Spalding, Troup and Ware counties, for instance, are now led by election skeptics, including one man who called President Joe Biden a “pedophile” and made sexually degrading comments about Vice President Kamala Harris. If the judge had accepted Adams’ argument, these county........

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