First legal efforts to overturn 2024 election underway in Georgia

A Republican election official in Atlanta has refused to certify results and is suing with the help of the Trump campaign.

UPDATE: American Doom has discovered that Julie Adams has even more significant ties to the election denier movement than have been previously reported. I’ll share more of that information in the coming days in another collaboration with Rolling Stone, but first I wanted to give a rundown of what has been largely missed by local and even national press — Adams’ actions and the Trump-backed lawsuit filed in Fulton County represent the first legal salvo in Trump’s attempts to call the 2024 election into question. This post is for paid subscribers. If you’d like to support our efforts to expose election deniers like Adams and other threats to democracy, you can subscribe for as little as $5 a month.

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Donald Trump’s policy organization has filed its first attempt to call into question November’s election results in Georgia — a pivotal swing state critical to Trump’s bid for the White House and a hotbed of pro-Trump election denier activity.

Last week, the America First Policy Institute — acting as the lawfare arm of Trump’s campaign — filed a lawsuit in Atlanta in support of a Republican member of the Fulton County elections board. The lawsuit claims that the board member, Julie Adams, should be able to access detailed records of ballots and voting records as part of her duty to certify election results — a previously ministerial task that has been beset with interference by Republican election deniers across the country who support Trump’s election lies, as I reported for Rolling Stone in March. The lawsuit claims that not only should Adams have access to this detailed material about ballots, ballot drop boxes, and voting machine tabulation records, but that her duty to certify election results is up to her discretion. This is important because calling into question or straight up tossing out votes in Fulton County would help swing Georgia toward Trump — and this lawsuit is part of that explicit gameplan.

The implications of this development cannot be overstated: if Adams, with the backing of Trump lawyers, is successful in getting a court to declare her right to the materials in question and her discretion to refuse to certify election results, it will pave the way for election boards throughout Georgia and the rest of the country to refuse to certify results in November. 

Such a scenario would cause utter chaos in the counting of votes, and is part of the Trump campaign’s playbook for overturning the presidential election.