Can state boards, county boards or anybody else use their administrative powers to flip electoral outcomes? After the November election, a majority
Can state boards, county boards or anybody else use their administrative powers to flip electoral outcomes? After the November election, a majority of Republican members of Congress and state attorneys basic signed on to efforts that might have invalidated hundreds of thousands of votes and caused a constitutional disaster. With that backdrop, it appears naïve to imagine that nobody would attempt to abuse such energy, whether or not in Georgia or elsewhere.
It’s value going again to Mr. Trump’s notorious name. Whereas the oft-quoted line about “discovering” votes makes it sound as if he needed Mr. Raffensperger to fabricate votes out of skinny air, Mr. Trump stated he had already discovered the votes, within the type of hundreds of ballots he stated have been forged illegally:
“We have now all of the votes we’d like. , we received the state. When you took, these are probably the most minimal numbers, the numbers that I gave you, these are numbers which are licensed, your absentee ballots despatched to vacant addresses, your out-of-state voters, 4,925. if you add them up, it’s many extra instances, it’s many instances the 11,779 quantity.”
Along with the 4,925 out-of-state voters talked about, Mr. Trump baselessly asserted within the name that there have been a whole lot of hundreds of absentee ballots with cast signatures. He alleged, primarily based on imperfect matches between lists of voters, that there have been 4,502 voters who voted however weren’t registered; 18,325 voters with vacant addresses; 904 voters who voted solely with a P.O. field tackle; and almost 5,000 votes by lifeless individuals. And with just about no proof whosever, he alleged nice malfeasance in Atlanta’s Fulton County, together with 18,000 votes having to do with somebody who did one thing nefarious and “3,000 kilos” of shredded ballots.
County and state election officers maintain a wide range of powers related to such claims. They consider whether or not to simply accept or reject ballots, they usually certify outcomes. In Georgia, they hear eligibility challenges. It will have been laborious to make use of these powers to help Mr. Trump, not to mention to outlive a subsequent courtroom problem. However there are levers that they may have at the very least tried to drag, even when it’s not clear what would have come of it.
One possibility is that the state board may have usurped the ability of Fulton County, primarily based on the president’s allegations within the basic election and different allegations from the first (the regulation requires proof of failed administration in at the very least two elections over the prior two years). The state board may have both used the president’s allegations as a foundation to refuse to certify the outcome or to disqualify in any other case eligible voters.
It will be laborious and even inconceivable to drag this off instantly after an election. The regulation requires a reasonably drawn-out listening to course of earlier than the state can intervene in county elections. The preliminary listening to can’t be held for at the very least 30 days after an preliminary petition, which is after the Georgia certification deadline. However maybe a nefarious board may lay the groundwork earlier, probably placing a newly appointed superintendent in management earlier than the elections, when she or he would have the power to pre-emptively disqualify voters and ballots.
County election boards heard comparable sorts of challenges to voter eligibility in the course of the Georgia runoff. The state Republican Get together and a Texas group challenged the eligibility of a whole lot of hundreds of voters in December, primarily based on whether or not a voter appeared to match somebody on the Postal Service listing of individuals within the Nationwide Change of Deal with Registry. Just a few small counties truly went by way of with attempting to invalidate voters on this foundation.
This eligibility problem was rejected by the U.S. District Courtroom Choose Leslie Abrams Gardner, who occurs to be the sister of Stacey Abrams, who narrowly misplaced the 2018 governor’s race in Georgia to Brian Kemp. However though the eligibility problem faltered within the runoff, it’s not apparent that ironclad protections exist in opposition to eligibility challenges, both as a matter of courtroom precedent or federal regulation. A narrower problem may have had a greater likelihood of surviving a courtroom problem. And the brand new Georgia regulation makes these sorts of challenges simpler, by permitting a single particular person to problem the eligibility of a vast variety of voters.