Election certification is a mandatory duty, not discretionary, for county election officials in Georgia, a judge ruled on Tuesday, rejecting assertions made by a Republican elections official that elections board members could refuse to certify an election based on their suspicions of fraud or error
It is very important to remove this ambiguity. Back in 2020, every bit of discretion was leveraged to try and steal the election:
All gentlemen’s agreements and voluntary traditions are opportunities for bad actors to have leverage over our elections.
Everything that can be mandated in writing, must be.
This is good news, mandating that all votes must be hand counted before certification occurred was meant to run out the clock so that the State of Georgia itself could not cast its votes for the Presidential election on time. This despite the fact that hand counting is actually less accurate than machine counting for the most part, and every ballot is hand tabulated at a later point anyways.
There is never any such “announcement” on election night. If the ongoing vote totals are large enough it is only media groups ( like AP) that “project the likely winner” and if ongoing vote totals are too close (as is the case in swing states) no media group can make that pronouncement.
It was only ever nothing more than ceremonial. None of these people doing the certifying have been on the ground tabulating, counting, auditing, watching, or doing one single thing involved in counting those ballots. They literally have nothing they can know that would allow them not to certify except feelings and sore loserism.
Well, someone has to gather all the data from the various counties and put a stamp on it. Otherwise all you have is a collection of separate county totals.
Are they getting paid, I don’t know, is it just part of their regular duties?
This was never a problem until someone couldn’t handle being the loser.
There has been some speculation that Kemp would not certify the election on time and have it revert to a vote in Congress which would probably give the victory to Trump. I did expect this move to go to the courts. This ruling is a good thing IMHO.
Georgia law says recount requests from the losing party go to the Superintendent of Election (local) and to the GA Secretary of State for federal elections.
The Call has been hindered by the GOP, who insists that mail in ballots are not allowed to be tabulated prior to election day in many swing states. Florida is a nice example of being able to call it early, but they aren’t hindered like Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Michigan and Whittmer just changed the way we counted votes because the Dems run both Houses this cycle. We should be able to post who won the state very soon after polls close, which is a good thing. Unsure if Pennsylvania, Arizona or Georgia was able to do something similar.
