Democrats Challenge GOP-Backed Election Rule Changes in Georgia

The newly approved election rules allow county election boards to question election results. The move stoked fears of election reporting delays.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger holds a press conference on the status of ballot counting in Atlanta on Nov. 6, 2020. Jessica McGowan/Getty Images

Democrats are suing the Georgia State Election Board to halt the implementation of new rules that grant additional investigatory powers to county election boards.

On Aug. 26, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Party of Georgia filed a verified petition for declaratory relief in the Superior Court of Fulton County, Georgia, against Georgia’s State Election Board.

The petition asks the court to enjoin the Election Board to make the certification of election results a mandatory duty and declare that election superintendents cannot delay the certification of election results nor refuse to certify them.

On Aug. 19, the board approved new rules allowing county election boards to conduct reasonable inquiries to ensure results are true and accurate and requiring the total ballot count to match the total number of voters.

The Republican National Committee supported the new rule.

In an Aug. 20 statement, the committee said that the county’s “board members now can question and act on potential fraud, or questionable or incorrect results, rather than simply signing off and approving the results when there are legitimate concerns.”

The petition said the rules, in effect, are an attempt to turn the election certification into “a broad license for individual board members to hunt for purported election irregularities.”

The Georgia State Election Board consists of five members, one of whom is appointed by the state House, one whom the state Senate chooses, one each from the Republican and Democrat parties, and a nonpartisan chair selected by the state’s General Assembly or the governor.

Before the board approved the new rules, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger spoke out against what his office called an eleventh-hour attempt to “impose new activist rulemaking.”

In his Aug. 15 statement, Raffensperger said that the moves would delay the reporting of election results and undermine the system’s safeguards.

“Delays in results create a vacuum that leads to misinformation and disinformation,” Raffensperger said in a statement.

Georgia is considered a battleground state in the 2024 presidential election.

In 2020, for only the second time since 1980, the Peach State sent its 16 electoral votes to the Democratic Party candidate for president.

According to the official results published by the Georgia secretary of state’s office, President Joe Biden beat former President Donald Trump by 12,670 votes in 2020.

Statements distributed by the Democratic National Convention, the national and Georgia state Democratic parties, and the Harris campaign, said the party has won legal challenges on election matters and will win again.

“Republicans in Georgia and across the country have been trying to lay the groundwork to challenge the election results when they lose again in November,” Quentin Fulks, principal deputy campaign manager for the Harris campaign, said in an Aug. 26 statement.

“Democrats are prepared, and we will stop them.”