Trump-backed Georgia election board members enact new rule that could throw wrench into 2024 vote certification

Left: An attendee holds a sign that says “This Meeting is Illegal” during a hastily planned State Election Board meeting at the Capitol in Atlanta on Friday, July 12, 2024 (Arvin Temkar/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP). Right: Ex-President and convicted felon Donald Trump speaks at the annual Road to Majority conference in Washington, DC, June 22, 2024 (Photo by Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via AP).

With only a few months to go until the 2024 presidential election, the battleground venue of Georgia will see a new policy go into effect in a little more than two weeks thanks to the Georgia State Election Board’s passage of a rule granting counties the power to demand a so-called “reasonable inquiry” before certifying election results.

When the policy was approved in a 3-2 vote by the election board on Tuesday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that a group of mostly Republican voters in attendance at the public meeting cheered. Notably, the three Republicans on the election board had received accolades from former President Donald Trump only days earlier when he name-dropped them at a campaign rally at Georgia State University.

“They’re on fire. They’re doing a great job, three members: Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares and Janelle King,” the 34-count convicted felon and nominee for the 2024 GOP presidential ticket said, according to the newspaper. “Three people are all pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.”

The new rule will officially take effect in 20 days but it can be challenged in court.

Republican state election board member Janice Johnston said after the vote that if elections are “conducted fairly and legally and accurately, most of the time, they are certified.”

“So it’s not the end of the world,” she said of the rule, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We’re not asking the board to do a full election audit or a forensic audit. We’re just asking for a reasonable inquiry.”

The votes against the policy came from the body’s sole Democrat, Sara Tindall Ghazal, and John Fervier, a Republican who crossed the aisle to join her. Notably, he was only recently appointed to the Georgia State Election Board by Gov. Brian Kemp, also a Republican.

Democrats and voting rights advocates argue that the policy is ill-defined and unnecessary since the state has not historically had issue certifying its votes until the recent meritless voter fraud claims brought by Republicans in 2020 and a resurgence again during primaries when local Republican election board members refused to certify votes while citing minor voting machine errors. More recently, the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump organization staffed by former Trump White House officials, sued on behalf of Fulton County Elections Board member Julie Adams seeking a ruling that would give Adams the right not to certify an election.

Current laws make Adams’ role on the election board ministerial. Ultimately, Adams, who was appointed to the Fulton County Election board in February, ended up abstaining when it came to certifying Georgia’s recent primary election. Adams is a member of the Election Integrity Network, a group founded by Trump ally Cleta Mitchell. Mitchell, an attorney and onetime adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, was on the call Trump had with Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger when Trump asked him to “find” 11,780 votes so he could be declared victor.

As Law&Crime reported , Mitchell left her law firm after the call was leaked.

Today, Georgia Democrats, like the state’s House Minority Whip Sam Park, argue the policy is “egregious” and fear it will trigger a wave of litigation not dissimilar from what unfolded in the state in 2020 when pro-Trump elector and attorney Lin Wood sued to block the certification results.

At a press conference after the vote, Park stressed that the new policy would give local election officials the ability to slow down or flat out refuse results merely by stating that they think there is a discrepancy but not offering much more than that.

This means election board officials will now perform their duties as if they are discretionary, not mandatory, he said.

And this, the legislator underlined, conflicts with state law.

The alleged vagueness of the word “reasonable” in “reasonable inquiry” also gave pause to governmental watchdog groups like Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

One attorney for the group, Nikhel Sus, reportedly reminded election board members on Tuesday that the language they approved would apply to all 159 counties and that made little sense given that “the word ‘reasonable’ is inherently subjective.”

“What’s reasonable to board members in one county may not be reasonable to members in another county,” Sus said. “This sort of open-ended language invites arbitrary and patchwork decision-making across counties.”

The rule is the brainchild of Michael Heekin, a Republican-appointed member of the Fulton County Election board. He first introduced it in May.

“This is not a ministerial act where I take out a stamp and say, ‘It’s hereby certified.’ There’s a higher order of mental processes that go on in this. If we go forward on this, I won’t get any more nasty letters from lawyers threatening to put me in jail,” Heekin said at a meeting of the state’s election board this spring, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution .

Heekin also opposed certifying election results declaring Joe Biden the winner in Georgia in 2020.

Fervier, the Republican who sided with the election board’s sole Democrat, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution he was “sympathetic” to the idea of being able to review voting materials before certification but there needed to be “guardrails” in place.

Yet, he said, “there don’t appear to be any guardrails around that process.”

King, a Republican, said she was for it because if she was “going to ask a county election worker to sign their name on a legal document saying this is in accurate, when in fact, they may see that there’s some discrepancies, then we’re setting them up for failure.”

Memorably, as Law&Crime reported, it was Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani who admitted that he made up claims of voter fraud in Georgia and specifically those accusations involving the election workers he defamed Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss . Giuliani nonetheless defended his claims as protected under his First Amendment right to free speech. He filed for bankruptcy in New York after he was ordered to pay a $148 million defamation judgment to the women in December. His bankruptcy case was dismissed last week.

The “reasonable inquiry” policy isn’t the only change Georgia’s state election board has ginned up.

In two weeks, the board will cast a final vote on a different proposed rule that will give board members the power to demand review of election documents before certifying the election results. That proposal was advanced on July 9, and at a hearing of the 3-1 vote, Ghazal again objected.

“Under your rule, a board member could refuse to certify until they see all of those documents,” Ghazal said before casting her lone dissenting vote. “Every document is not necessary for the certification of an election … The whole point is to make sure there are not more votes than ballots and not more ballots than voters checked in.”

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