A devastating blow for Georgia's election denial officials

Early voting has begun... A judge rules against election deniers... The Trump campaign has set their plans to claim a stolen election...

A lot of news to share today, some of which requires deeper analysis but I’m on the move. So for now, a brief dispatch will have to suffice.

Off the rip you should know that the years-long battle over county-level certification of election results in Georgia came to a climax yesterday. A judge in Atlanta, Robert McBurney, confirmed yesterday what election experts and Democrats have been saying for some time: county election board members throughout Georgia are required by law to certify results — whether they believe there was fraud, irregularities or not.

McBurney’s order provides a devastating blow to Georgia’s election denial movement and the county election board members who are at its vanguard — people like Julie Adams in Fulton County and David Hancock in Gwinnett County. They and others have insisted for some time that they have discretion to refuse to certify election results. Their interpretation of Georgia election law was flawed from the start, and McBurney’s Monday evening order cut their arguments to pieces.

If Adams, Hancock and other election denial officials on Georgia’s county election boards were allowed to arbitrarily refuse to certify results, as they’ve argued they should be able to do, they would be “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 in his order. “Our Constitution and our Election Code do not allow for that to happen.”

So, county election boards must certify results. Refusing to do so would open them up to possible criminal charges, McBurney said. We’ll see if the true believers in election lies throughout Georgia’s 159 counties want to put their money where their mouths are and risk criminal prosecution in their pursuit of helping Donald Trump to win at all costs. When officials elsewhere have skirted this line, they’ve ended up in court or prison. Ask Peggy Judd how she likes having to fend off a prison sentence for refusing to certify results in Arizona, or Tina Peters how she likes her 9-year sentence for breaching election equipment in Colorado.

Said Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, Fair Fight Senior Legal Advisor: "The Court’s ruling reinforces that Georgia law does not allow local election officials to hold our elections hostage by refusing to certify the results. The sound legal principles applied in this order should also apply in the several cases challenging the State Election Board’s recent election rule changes, and those rules should not be permitted to silence Georgia voters."

More on certification

• Election denial activists force rules upon Georgia voters with impunity

• Georgia election denial official fakes voting against certification

• Georgia election board grants more power for local officials to deny results

• Pro-Trump Georgia election Board passes rule enabling mass certification denial

You might remember that refusals to certify results were given a boost in August when the State Election Board passed two rules that essentially gave county election board members more power to hold up certification. Thanks to McBurney’s order, those rules are now even more suspect. But let’s not forget that the two certification rules passed by the SEB were legally questionable from the jump. That’s why Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger criticized the rules. It’s also why, if you believe election denial activists moaning about it on social media, Raffensberger put a notice out to county election officials last week saying they didn’t have to comply with the two new certficiation rules passed in August by the SEB.

“Just heard from reliable source that is in contact with County Election Boards that SoS Raffensperger sent Election Board emails saying they didn’t have to comply with the rules passed by the SEB because there is ongoing litigation,” Debbie Dooley, an election denier who has petitioned the SEB to pass rules based in election lies, wrote on X last week.

In other news…

• I spoke with Brian Tyler Cohen about my Rolling Stone report from yesterday detailing Trump and Republicans’ plans to blame an election loss in November on undocumented immigrants — an emerging narrative that has no basis in fact. Lies about undocumented immigrants voting in November are part of Republican efforts to purge as many as 1.4 million voters from voter rolls in swing states. These vote challenges — prohibited under the “quiet period” provision of the National Voter Registration Act — continue to pour in. In Georgia last week, election deniers challenged the voter registrations of more than 2,000 voters in Hall County and 859 voters in Bryan County.

• Today at Rolling Stone, I joined Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez in detailing how Trump and Republicans purposefully made it more difficult to count mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin order to facilitate forthcoming claims that the slow-count of results is evidence of fraud. Just as was the case in 2020, it is not. Combined with unfounded claims of millions of ineligible voters, non-existent fraud from mail-in ballots will be used by Trump and others to claim the election was stolen from him — as early as Election Night if not before, Swin reported in our story. There is no excuse to not understand that this is a lie based in Trump’s desperate attempt to win the election and, thus, avoid prison for his many crimes.

• By now you might have heard that MAGA extremists are threatening FEMA workers and other folks trying to help victims of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and elsewhere. This development shows not just how deeply divided we are but how willing many Americans are in fighting the very people trying to help them based on their belief in misinformation and culture war lies. Not a good sign for November.

• Early voting has begun in Georgia, and is already breaking records for turnout. This probably isn’t a good sign for Republicans, in my opinion. It signals that Democratic voters are fired up and ready to get out the vote as soon as possible to prevent a Trump win.

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P.S. That’s all for now. As always, you can support my work here at American Doom by choosing a paid subscription for as little as $5 a month or buying me a cup of coffee. New paid subscribers in the U.S. get this American Doom sticker. Put it on your car to let people know you’re in-the-know and to prompt what will probably be an awful conversation with someone who believes FEMA didn’t have money to help Helene victims because the funds went to undocumented immigrants instead. (They did not.)