Fulton County Board of Elections Member Julie Adams refused to certify the state’s May 21 primary election result. Her fellow board members outvoted her, and the election was certified after she filed a lawsuit against both the board and County Elections Director Nadine Williams. Her lawsuit seeks to get the court to declare that the Election Board’s execution of their duties, especially where it concerns certifying election results, is up to their discretion. As this paper’s editorial board observed, this is nonsense.
Our organization, Protect Democracy, recently issued a report on election certification laws in several states, including Georgia. Without exception, we have found that certification is a mandatory duty that officials have no discretion to ignore. Adams’s claim that election certification is discretionary is radically misguided and dangerous. Our hope is that if more Americans understand that election certification interference is simply not a viable option, officials will stop trying to usurp the process as a way to make a political statement or spread election conspiracy theories.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Georgia’s election laws make clear that the duty to certify an election is purely ministerial and that Adams and other board members have no legal discretion to refuse to certify. Those laws use clear and mandatory language in directing the certification process. The Georgia Election Code states clearly that “returns shall be certified no later than 5pm
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
on the Monday following the election and immediately transmitted to the Secretary of State.” Further, the code explains that even in the event that some error or fraud is discovered, election officials “shall compute and certify the votes justly, regardless of any fraudulent or erroneous returns presented to him or her, and shall report the facts to the appropriate district attorney for action.”
Election results must undergo several layers of verification before they are certified, and every state, including Georgia, provides mechanisms — such as recounts, audits, and other direct legal challenges to election results — by which the results or procedural integrity of an election can be contested and investigated. It is these mechanisms, not certification, that provide the proper forum for adjudicating any disputes about election results. This is by design, as legislators who adopted modern certification rules were concerned about partisan actors abusing the certification process to game the system and ensure that their preferred candidate is declared the victor.
These concerns were well founded. Adams’s refusal to certify the election and subsequent lawsuit mark just the latest attempt by a local election official to circumvent their legal obligation to certify election results and disrupt election processes, spread unfounded claims about our elections, and undermine confidence in election results. By our estimate, there have been more than 20 attempts by local officials to subvert the proper certification of elections since 2020. All have failed, and we expect the court will find that Adams’s lawsuit, like previous attempts to impede the certification process, relies upon faulty legal reasoning.
At its root, Adams’s claim that she has the power to refuse to certify election results — along with other anti-democratic tactics such as mass challenges to voter eligibility, calls for error-prone hand counts, frivolous audits and denouncing the accuracy of voter rolls — has one main goal: to sow enough doubt to allow her and like-minded election deniers to declare the 2024 election illegitimate if they find the results unfavorable. This playbook is not new, and Georgians shouldn’t fall for it.
Peter Simmons is the Georgia Policy Strategist at Protect Democracy, nonpartisan nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing American democracy from declining into a more authoritarian form of government. Emily Rodriguez is a communications and advocacy strategist at Protect Democracy and was the lead author on the organizations’ report “Election Certification is Not Optional: Why refusing to certify the 2024 election would be illegal.”
