County election boards in Georgia cannot refuse to release election results, a state judge ruled Tuesday.
Concerns about fraud or abuse should be settled in court, the judge said, and not by provincial officials acting unilaterally.
“If, as plaintiff emphasizes, election superintendents were free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury and judge and thus refuse to announce election results due to a unilateral finding of error or fraud, Georgia voters would be silenced . Our Constitution and our election law do not allow this to happen,” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney said in his order.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, former President Donald Trump and his allies pressured county officials to block certification of his loss. Since then, Republican members of the boards have used the once routine process of approving election results and sending them to the state as a political battleground.
McBurney said the law was clear when it said provincial officials “shall” certify the results. In the footnotes he said the word was very clear.
“To users of common language, ‘shall’ means instruction or command: you will not succeed!” he wrote, quoting the famous battle cry of Lord of the Rings’ Gandalf. “And generally, even lawyers, legislators and judges interpret ‘shall’ as ‘a word of command.'”
Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, had gone to court claiming that she should refuse to release the election results if she believed the results were incorrect or unreliable.
Adams, a member and regional coordinator of former Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell’s activist group Election Integrity Network, abstained from voting to certify the primary results in Georgia in May of this year. She is one of a growing number of Georgia officials who have refused to release election results since 2020, raising concerns among election experts that provincial officials could try to block the routine certification of election results in the name of baseless conspiracy theories.
Compounding these concerns, the Republican-controlled Georgia State Election Board voted earlier this year to allow local governments to conduct “reasonable investigations” into election results. The rule did not define “reasonable inquiry,” leading some to worry that the rule would allow county election boards to request vast amounts of information and potentially delay or block the certification of results if they see fit.
Election officials in Georgia celebrated Tuesday’s ruling.
“Great news!” wrote Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer of the Georgian Secretary of State, on Another step in maintaining the guardrails to protect our elections.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
