Safeguards Will Prevent Georgia Board From Blocking Certification Indefinitely. But Delays Could Still Wreak Havoc

While Georgia has safeguards in place to prevent officials from indefinitely refusing to certify the results of the upcoming election, the newly approved rules by the MAGA-controlled Georgia State Election board have the potential to delay election certification for up to seven days. Experts tell TPM such a delay could open the floodgates to potential threats of violence and upheaval, all while sowing seeds of distrust in the election system. 

The statutes outlined in Georgia’s Election Integrity Act, passed in 2021 in the aftermath of the 2020 election and Donald Trump’s efforts to change the results in the state, will prevent any bad actors from outright blocking election result certification there. As Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger noted in a recent tweet, the state law mandates that counties certify election results by November 12. 

“The safeguard is the law, which says that the boards of registration shall certify results no later than 5 p.m. on the Monday following the Tuesday election,” Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for Raffensperger’s office, said in an interview with TPM. 

Despite this safeguard, any delay in certification can and likely will spark unrest. Experts tell TPM that unrest or chaos injected into the election administration system could increase the possibility of administrative mistakes, thereby elevating the risk of potential violence against election workers or officials. It also could create a vacuum for bad actors to insert themselves and try to halt the process. 

“I think there’s real concern that there will be — that people will use these delays opportunistically in order to pretend they have power and authority and discretion over the election process that they do not have,” explained Justin Levitt, an election law scholar and professor at LMU Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. “There’s an awful lot of grift in this game who want to stoke chaos and will use the opportunity…to pretend that things are not as they are.”

On August 6, in a 3-2 vote, the Trump-endorsed board approved a rule giving the board the power to not certify the results of the election until after a “reasonable inquiry” into any discrepancies in the voting process at the county level has been conducted by election officials. The rule, however, is intentionally vague and never explicitly defines what exactly constitutes a “reasonable inquiry.”

That same month, the board approved yet another rule that gives board members the power to “examine all election-related documentation before certifying the results.” The rule also gives the board authority to examine any discrepancies between the ballot count and the number of voters prior to certification. 

Both of these rules give the newly-elected, Trump-endorsed election deniers on the board — whom Trump recently described as “pitbulls, fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory” at an Atlanta campaign rally — the power to delay certification based on false claims of election fraud.

The Democratic National Committee, the Georgia Democratic Party and Democratic members of several election boards are currently pursuing a legal challenge against the state election board over the rules, and the potential for chaos and violence on Election Day that they carry with them. The Democratic groups argued in recent court filings in Fulton County that the board’s rules “threaten to upend the statutorily required process for certifying election results in Georgia.”

“This risk is not hypothetical: following recent elections, county officials across Georgia have already sought to block or delay certification in defiance of state laws; the new rules hand those officials new tools to do so again in November, which would create chaos and risk disenfranchising large numbers of Georgia’s voters,” the petitioner’s trial brief reads.

The plaintiffs are asking the court to declare that election board members do not have the authority to delay certification or to simply not certify election results, per state law.

David Levine, an election integrity consultant and former elections administrator, told TPM that although he has confidence that “democracy will hold” and that the election will be certified in Georgia, he too has concerns that any delay in certification will only give bad actors additional fodder to cast further doubt on the integrity of elections.

“These false misconceptions of how elections work are, frankly, helping fuel these laws in Georgia, and those things can obviously help fuel further distrust of the election process,” he said. 

He also emphasized to TPM that the rules have the potential to introduce more administrative mistakes in the process, which can ultimately, as we saw in 2020, lead to the violent targeting of election workers. 

“I worry about our capacity to deal with doubt about that when people have been consistently lied to along the way,” Levitt added. “I think it’s what happens if certification isn’t forthcoming, how much patience can people have in the meantime is the real question.”