Picture the following scenario: On Election Day this year, you and your neighbors head to the polls to cast your vote for candidates up and down the ballot. After the polls close, poll workers and local election officials carry out a rigorous, multi-step process to tally the votes, check for any discrepancies in the vote totals, and ensure that final results are accurate. A few weeks later, it comes time for the local board of elections, a bipartisan body that certifies the election results for your county, to sign off on the completion of that process. But one of the board members refuses. That member, with known ties to election conspiracy theorists, demands to investigate the votes — a request that falls far outside the lines of a certifying official’s duties. The election itself was smooth, but still this person refuses to proceed with their mandatory duty, placing the votes of thousands in your county — including yours — at risk.
This is not a hypothetical. In May, this was a reality in Georgia’s Fulton County, home to Atlanta. Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton County Board of Elections and an active participant in an election denier group, refused to certify the county’s primary election earlier this year based on vague claims of “discrepancies.” The rest of the board voted to certify the results in late May, while Adams abstained. She has since filed a lawsuit against the very board she sits on and Fulton County’s election director, arguing that as a local election official, she can refuse to certify the results until the county provides her with mountains of election data to investigate the election.
Adams’ argument — that certifying officials should have some flexibility in their ministerial role — contradicts Georgia state law, history, and supreme court precedent. Yet three Republicans on Georgia’s state election board just backed it up. On Tuesday, the state board voted to adopt a new rule that empowers local boards to pursue a “reasonable inquiry” into election results before certifying the election. Without defining or setting any limits on that “reasonable inquiry,” the new rule endangers the certification process and could encourage local election officials who want to conduct time-consuming investigations. And while a majority of a local board would have to vote to actually delay certification beyond the statutory deadline, the number of election deniers on local boards has significantly increased in recent years. As it stands now, the rule makes Georgia an outlier compared to every other state in the country, setting the state on a dangerous path come November.
Before the state board adopted the rule change, the Brennan Center filed a friend-of-the-court brief in Adams’s lawsuit to emphasize that her arguments are at odds with state law. Certification is not optional. In fact, the Georgia Supreme Court affirmed this over 100 years ago in a similar incident. In 1898, a certification dispute in Coffee County’s general election delayed the results for months. The county’s Democratic local officials, over their Populist Party colleagues’ objections, refused to certify the returns for a single precinct based on minor procedural questions about how the election was administered. The returns had no obvious problems, but the Democrats’ motives were obvious: without the precinct’s returns, their party’s candidates for two races would win by just a handful of votes.
Ultimately, the state supreme court stepped in to resolve the crisis by ordering the officials to certify the returns for all precincts. The court explained that the local officials “were not selected for their knowledge of the law.” For this reason, certification was a mandatory duty, and the officials’ discretion was limited to referring any problems to the proper court processes.
Similar disputes took place across the country throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. And without exception, a single pattern emerged: early state legislatures and courts worried that making certification optional would create opportunities for local officials to confuse legal issues, manipulate the results, and abuse the process to further their political agendas. As a result, they wrote and interpreted state certification laws to make clear that local officials are not supposed to investigate or weigh in on legal issues when they certify. Instead, those questions must be left to courts that hear post-election challenges and criminal proceedings, and there is no wiggle room for local certifying officials to take matters into their own hands. In other words, their one and only duty is to sign off on the completeness of the results.
Adams’s refusal to certify is precisely the scenario that the certification apparatus is designed to prevent. If a rogue official refuses to certify an election, every state has enforcement mechanisms in place to make sure that certification proceeds on time. Indeed, Adams’s case is one in a line of recent attempts to interfere with certification, all rooted in the same baseless lies about widespread election fraud and a stolen 2020 presidential election. In each instance, courts and state officials have successfully intervened to ensure certification takes place as planned.
Still, these attacks cause harm. Each attempt to interfere with certification undercuts confidence in our elections and disrupts the careful balance and timeline of the election administration cycle at a time when election administrators are already overwhelmed in a busy presidential election year. With November only a few months away, the stakes could not be higher.
But voters in Georgia and elsewhere should know this: if a local official refuses to certify an election, that does not mean there is a problem with the votes. And there are processes in place to make sure that their votes will be counted and certified on time. Attempts to interfere with certification are the latest turn in the broader election denier scheme to sow doubt in our elections. Voters should not take the bait.
