ELECTION INTEGRITYElection Deniers Secretly Pushed Rule That Would Make It Easier to Delay Certification of Georgia’s Election Results
On Monday, the GOP-controlled State Election Board is poised to adopt the rule, which would potentially allow county officials, including one who secretly backed the rule, to throw the election results of the swing state into chaos this fall.
Georgia’s GOP-controlled State Election Board is poised to adopt a rule on Monday that would give county election board members an additional avenue to delay certification of election results, potentially allowing them to throw the state’s vote count into chaos this fall.
A former Fulton County election official who submitted an initial draft of the rule told ProPublica that she had done so at the behest of a regional leader of a right-wing organization involved in challenging the legitimacy of American election systems. That organization, the Election Integrity Network, is led by Cleta Mitchell, who helped orchestrate attempts to overturn the 2020 election and spoke on the call in which former President Donald Trump demanded that Georgia’s secretary of state “find” him 11,780 votes to undo Joe Biden’s victory.
The Election Integrity Network’s role in bringing forward the proposed rule has not been previously reported.
The State Election Board’s Monday meeting comes on the heels of a vote less than two weeks before that empowered county election board members to conduct “reasonable inquiry” into allegations of voting irregularities. That rule did not set deadlines for how long such inquiries might last or describe what they might entail, and critics worried that this omission could cause Georgia to miss the Dec. 11 deadline for sending its certified presidential election results to the federal government.
The new rule is even more concerning, election experts said, because it requires county boards to investigate discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of people who voted in a precinct, no matter how minor. It bars counties from certifying the election tallies until officials can review an investigation of every precinct with inconsistent totals. Such inconsistencies are commonplace, not evidence of malfeasance, and only in extremely rare circumstances affect the outcome of elections. The requirement to explain every one of them and litigation around investigations into them could take far longer than the time allowed by law to certify.
“If this rule is adopted, any claims of fraud, any claims of discrepancies, could be the basis for a county board member — acting in bad faith — to say, ‘I’m not confident in the results,’ and hold up certification under the flimsiest of pretexts,” said Ben Berwick, who leads the election law and litigation team of Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that works to protect the integrity of American elections.
