'Huge defeat for Trump': Experts celebrate ruling requiring GA officials to certify election

15 October 2024

The acolytes of former President Donald Trump sitting on the Georgia State Election Board just suffered a stinging defeat at the hands of Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney.

ABC News reported Tuesday that McBurney's decision still requires all county election officials to certify election results by the statutory deadline even if they feel the need to investigate the conduct of elections. The decision slams the door on a previous ruling by the state election board aimed at making it easier for members of county election boards to refuse certification if they suspect fraud.

"No election superintendent (or member of a board of elections and registration) may refuse to certify or abstain from certifying election results under any circumstance," McBurney wrote in the decision.

McBurney's ruling was celebrated by various legal experts on X (formerly Twitter) after Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias announced McBurney's decision on his website, Democracy Docket. Elias, who helped Democrats argue the case in court, called it "a big defeat for election deniers in Georgia."

"Huge victory for democracy," tweeted Tristan Snell, a former prosecutor with the New York Attorney General's Office. "Huge defeat for Trump's attempts to scuttle the election."

TV producer Morgan J. Freeman (not the actor) praised the ruling as "HUGE" and celebrated that "Georgia is NOT allowing Donald Trump to CHEAT." Bestselling author Nicole Perlroth observed that while it was "absurd this had to be fought in court," McBurney's decision was a "victory for democracy nonetheless."

Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance also noted the significance of McBurney's decision, mentioning that Trump has for years attempted to throw a wrench into the gears of the certification process. She noted that the January 6, 2021 insurrection was, at its core, an attempt to interrupt certification of an election whose result was unfavorable for Trump.

"Trump tried to get his VP to interfere with certifying the vote on Jan 6 2021," she wrote. "Since that didn't work, there's now a move to interfere with certification at the state/county level. A Fulton County judge just ruled that can't be done. Certifying vote counts is purely ministerial."

On the social media platform Bluesky, Darin Self — an assistant political science professor at Brigham Young University — took a different tone. He lamented that American democracy was in such a perilous state that "a judge has to tell officials, yes, you do actually have to count the votes."

The decision was notably handed down on the same day that early voting began in the Peach State. Former New York Daily News and Boston Herald journalist Helen Kennedy reminded her Bluesky followers that former President Jimmy Carter — who recently turned 100 years old — achieved his goal of hanging on long enough to cast his Georgia ballot for Vice President Kamala Harris.

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