'Not required to conduct an investigation': Republican AG spars with MAGA election board

20 August 2024

The election board for one battleground state that flipped from former President Donald Trump in 2016 to President Joe Biden in 2020 may have been taken over by MAGA-adjacent activists, but it has nevertheless been recently rebuffed by a Republican attorney general.

Online news outlet NOTUS reported Tuesday on a move by the Georgia State Election Board — whose five-member board is controlled by a GOP majority — in which it directed the Peach State's top law enforcement official to "immediately investigate with outside investigators" about an already-settled claim of supposed fraud in Fulton County in the 2020 election. Attorney General Christopher Carr — a Republican who fended off a Trump-endorsed challenger in 2022 — recently reasserted his authority in an opinion that officially rejected the board's directive.

The election board's request was worded as a command, with the board telling Carr's office to submit “a report within 30 days." Board members added that “if [the AG’s staff] are unwilling/unable, to seek outside legal counsel to conduct the investigation.”

Carr responded on Monday that his office "is not required to conduct an investigation on its own or with outside personnel at the direction of a client agency." NOTUS further reported that Carr quoted the Official Code of Georgia in the opinion.

"The attorney general alone is statutorily vested with the power to select and engage private counsel to provide legal services for entities of the executive branch of state government," Carr wrote.

Despite Carr's gesture, the Peach State's elections board is still charging ahead with several controversial moves that will complicate the efforts of municipalities and counties to conduct straightforward elections while announcing results in a timely fashion. In a recent column, MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin noted that the Georgia State Election Board is now allowing counties to delay certification of results should it choose to conduct "reasonable inquiries" into supposed fraudulent activity. And it recently approved an amendment by Cobb County Republican Party chair Salleigh Grubbs (also known as the "Grubbs Rule") that would make election workers' jobs even more complicated.

"As laid out in Grubbs' petition, the amendment requires county boards to conduct a precinct-by-precinct 'reconciliation' of votes in which they must \'compare the total number of ballots cast to the total number of unique voter ID numbers,'" she wrote. "It further requires that if there is any discrepancy between the two, no matter how small or non-outcome-determinative, an investigation must be launched."

"But that's not all. The so-called Grubbs Rule also empowers county-level election commissioners to 'examine all election-related documentation created during the conduct of elections prior to certification of results.'" Rubin added. "That lesser-known feature of the rule has been flagged to me by voting rights lawyers and activists as not just a way to delay or withhold certification, but more significantly, a potential means to collect 'evidence' to perpetuate another 'big lie' should Vice President Kamala Harris win the presidential election in Georgia.

Aside from the Georgia State Board of Elections, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger – a Republican — is also paving the way for a complicated 2024 election in the Southern battleground state. Earlier this month, he announced a new website that would allow anyone to challenge any Georgia voter's registration, provided the petitioner includes a voter's driver's license number and date of birth. A security breach briefly made voters' dates of birth and driver's license numbers visible, meaning there could be a wave of challenges to voter registrations over the next few months.

The draconian changes to Georgia's election laws comes after Biden won the state in 2020, flipping it blue for the first time since 1992. And after Trump lost Georgia, both of the Peach State's Republican U.S. senators lost their reelection bids to Sens. Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia), giving the state its first unified Democratic U.S. Senate delegation in decades. Both chambers of Georgia's legislature are deeply Republican, however, and Republican Governor Brian Kemp was reelected to a second four-year term in 2022.

Click here to read NOTUS' full report. And click here to read Rubin's column.

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