A judge in Georgia on Wednesday invalidated several new election rules, saying the measures approved by the state’s Republican-controlled election board are “unconstitutional” and contrary to state law.
The ruling, handed down by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox, applies to seven rules, including a hand-counting rule for ballots on Election Day and rules related to certifying results.
Cox wrote that the five-member board, including three officials praised by former President Donald Trump, “did not have the authority to implement these rules” and that the measures were “illegal, unconstitutional and void.”
Georgia’s secretary of state and the state election board did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday evening.
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Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney on Tuesday blocked the rule requiring ballots to be counted by hand on Election Day, which critics say would cause delays in reporting the final results. McBurney also ruled that state election boards could not refuse to release election results.
The lawsuit was filed by a pair of Georgia voters, including former Republican state Rep. Scot Turner, who heads the election policy advocacy group Eternal Vigilance Action, which is also named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit. Their lawyers said in a filing last month that the board’s adoption of the rules “risks destabilizing Georgia’s voting process, vote counting and vote certification process.”
Turner praised the ruling on X on Wednesday evening.
“This is a victory for the Constitution and the principle of separation of powers,” he wrote. “Every conservative should see this as a victory and a significant setback for an unelected, law-making government. We thank Judge Cox for issuing his ruling efficiently.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented civil rights groups that intervened in the case, called the ruling “a major victory for voting rights.”
The state’s new election rules also faced significant criticism and legal challenges from the Democratic National Committee and the State Democratic Party, which sued the Board of Elections in August over the new rules.
Voters in the battleground state, which Trump narrowly lost to Joe Biden in 2020, went to the polls on Tuesday for in-person early voting. An election official for the Secretary of State said more than 300,000 ballots had been counted after polls closed on the first day, breaking the record set by the first day of early voting in the 2020 election.
Trump and more than a dozen of his allies, including top officials in his administration, were indicted last year in connection with efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden in Georgia. The case has been put on hold due to efforts to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis as prosecutor.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
