Ga. Official Appeals Election Certification Ruling

(Dreamstime)

Julie Adams, a member of the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections in Georgia, appealed a state judge’s ruling stating that local election officials don’t have an option when it comes to certifying the election results in November, reported The Hill.

Judge Robert C.I. McBurney made the ruling Oct. 15 in response to Adams’ lawsuit against Nadine Williams, director of the Fulton County Board of Elections.

Adams refused to certify the county’s results from the primary elections on May 21 after Williams didn’t allow her to access election data to confirm the accuracy of the returns.She asked the court to define the certification duties of her job.

McBurney ruled that Georgia law requires officials like her to certify without delay.

“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.”

Mike Berry, the executive director for the center for litigation at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, and Adams’ lawyer, recently told CNN that his client “should have access to the data to be able to do her job, and for people to take that and try to extrapolate conspiracy theories about what might happen in November I think is misplaced and overblown.”