All Voting is Local, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, Campaign Legal Center, and Protect Democracy have coauthored “Election Certification Processes and Guardrails,” guides to election certification and the state laws protecting the process in seven battleground states. The guides explain how state laws can protect against threats or delays to election certification and emphasize that refusal to certify is illegal in each state.
The guides published today are written for elections officials in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Each state’s guide provides the legal mechanisms that state and local officials can deploy in response to refusals to certify elections. Across all states:
- Certification of election results is a mandatory duty
- If an official delays or refuses to certify results, state officials and courts can step in to compel certification.
- State officials can hold officials who refuse to certify accountable through civil and criminal penalties.
Since 2020, over 30 local elections officials across the country have voted against or threatened to refuse to certify an election. Earlier this year, three commissioners in Washoe County, Nevada initially refused to certify the results of two primary election recounts. Two of the three commissioners reversed course, acknowledging that they had a mandatory legal duty to certify. That effort to disrupt the mandatory certification process, like every other attempt, was unsuccessful. In some instances, the rogue officials’ actions caused delays but the election results were ultimately certified. Despite their failures, these attempts may still succeed in sowing further distrust in the elections process overall and plant the seeds for bad-faith rejection of the results in the 2024 presidential election.
Related resources:
- “Election Deniers Continue Attempts to Meddle with Certification — But the Process Is Resilient,” Brennan Center (August 2024)
- “Election Certification, Explained,” Protect Democracy (July 2024)
- “Certification Is Not Optional,” Protect Democracy (March 2024)
- “How State and Local Election Certification Works,” Brennan Center (March 2024)
- “Can Georgia’s Election Board Refuse to Certify Results? The Law Says No” Campaign Legal Center (September 2024)
