Georgia judge says county election officials cannot delay or decline certification of election results

County election officials in Georgia cannot delay or decline to certify election results, a state judge ruled Monday, dealing a blow to an effort by conservatives in the critical battleground state to broaden their powers.

“Election superintendents in Georgia have a mandatory fixed obligation to certify election results,” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in an 11-page ruling. “Consequently, no election superintendent (or member of a board of elections and registration) may refuse to certify or abstain from certifying election results under any circumstance.”

The case is one or two closely watched disputes over election certification in the critical battleground state. A ruling is still pending in a separate case brought by state and national Democrats against new rules from the State Election Board that could give local election officials broad authority to delay or decline altogether their certification of the results.

McBurney said in his ruling that while local superintendents have an obligation to “investigate concerns about miscounts,” such concern “is not cause to delay or decline certification.”

The case was brought by Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, who had asked the judge to declare that her duties in certifying election results “are discretionary not ministerial.”

“If election superintendents were, as Plaintiff urges, 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. “Our Constitution and our Election Code do not allow for that to happen.”

Fulton County has had legitimate problems running its elections and earlier this year the State Election Board reprimanded the county and ordered an independent election monitor because of issues that arose around the 2020 presidential election, including an incident where a batch of ballots were double-scanned during one of the 2020 recounts.

But the extensive reviews of Georgia’s 2020 election – which included two machine vote counts and one hand count— did not reveal evidence of widespread fraud. Evidence has not emerged showing tally sheets were tampered with or drop box ballots were improperly taken by couriers, in 2020 or in subsequent elections.