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    Arizona attorney general says she won’t drop Trump fake electors case

    Allies of Donald Trump who were charged in Arizona for illegally trying to overturn the 2020 election can still expect to face justice despite his return to the White House, the state’s attorney general has said.Kris Mayes told MSNBC on Sunday that she had “no intention” of dropping the criminal case against defendants including the former Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Christina Bobb, his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and senior officials of the Arizona Republican party such as the former chair Kelli Ward and state senators Anthony Kern and Jake Hoffman.A grand jury in April indicted 18 people in a “fake electors” scheme that sought to falsely declare Trump the winner in the crucial swing state instead of Joe Biden. Most pleaded not guilty in May to felony charges of fraud, forgery and conspiracy.The fates of various criminal cases pending against Trump and his allies were left uncertain after his defeat of Kamala Harris in the 5 November election.For instance, the US justice department is winding down its criminal cases in federal court against Trump.And, in New York, state court judge Juan Merchan is preparing to rule on whether Trump’s conviction on charges of criminally falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels should be tossed out.But Mayes has said she intends to stay the course with her office’s case.“I have no intention of breaking that case up. I have no intention of dropping that case,” Mayes, a Democrat, told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi.“A grand jury in the state of Arizona decided that these individuals who engaged in an attempt to overthrow our democracy in 2020 should be held accountable, so we won’t be cowed, we won’t be intimidated.”In August, Loraine Pellegrino, the former president of a Republican women’s group, became the first of the defendants convicted when she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of filing a false document.Another of those accused, Jenna Ellis, a former Trump lawyer, agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, including sitting for interviews and handing over documents, in exchange for having her charges dismissed.At the time, Mayes said Ellis’s insights were “invaluable and will greatly aid the state in proving its case in court”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlso in August, the Arizona superior court judge Bruce Cohen denied a request by the remaining defendants to have the charges dismissed as “politically motivated” and set a provisional trial date for January 2026.As a state case, anybody who is convicted in Arizona cannot be pardoned by Trump, who was referred to throughout the charging documents as an unindicted co-conspirator and as the “former president of the United States who spread false claims of election fraud following the 2020 election”.The Arizona fake electors scheme was replicated in a number of swing states that ultimately all certified Biden’s victory. The most prominent took place in Georgia, where Trump is one of the defendants, although two charges against him were thrown out in September – and some of the 17 others originally charged have accepted plea deals in return for giving evidence to prosecutors.Fani Willis, the Fulton county prosecutor who brought the Georgia case, was re-elected on 5 November. But no trial date has been set, and there is doubt over its timing given that Trump will be back in the White House in January.The other defendants in the Arizona case include Kelli Ward’s husband, Michael; Robert Montgomery, former head of the Cochise county Republican party; Tyler Bowyer, the Republican national committee’s Arizona representative; Greg Safsten, former executive director of the state Republican party; and activists Samuel Moorhead and Nancy Cottle, who allegedly agreed to act as fake electors. More

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    What is voter certification – the process that Trump targeted in 2020?

    With voting completed in the US presidential election, election officials across the country will now turn to certifying the results before the electoral college meets in December and Congress certifies the vote in January.Until the 2020 election, few paid attention to certification, which was seen as a bureaucratic way of officializing the results of the election. But after 2020, Donald Trump and allies, who questioned the election results, targeted the certification process as a way of causing confusion. In advance of the presidential election, there were deep concerns that the former president and allies would try and block certification of the election results, starting at the local level.Trump’s victory in the election means that there likely won’t be an effort to block certification of the presidential results. But there still are some close US Senate and House races that could prompt battles over certification. Experts say it is clear that certification is not discretionary and those who refuse to certify could face criminal penalties.What is certification?Certification refers generally to the process of making the election results official. The process works differently in each state. Election results are unofficial until they are certified.It takes place after a canvass, the process that takes place after every election to aggregate all of the ballot totals, resolving outstanding disputes over challenged or provisional ballots and reconciling any discrepancies or inconsistencies. Officials investigate any discrepancies, if they exist, in vote totals. The process varies by jurisdiction, but there is usually a board of people which then votes to certify the election. Various state laws make it clear that this is a ministerial responsibility and that officials cannot refuse to do so.For a statewide election, results are certified at both the local and state level.Is certification when disputes over election results are resolved?No. The canvass and certification process is aimed at reconciling vote totals and getting an official count. The process may identify abnormalities that could become the basis for an election contest or challenge later. State laws allow for separate legal processes outside of the certification process to challenge election results. These typically take place in the courts.What happens if an official or a board refuses to certify?Most boards certify the vote on a majority vote, so a single member refusing to certify wouldn’t block certification.But if a majority of the board refuses to certify, a secretary of state or election watchdog group would likely sue them to get a court to force them to certify. Watchdog groups have already warned that those who refuse to certify will face criminal charges.Could an effort to block certification actually work?No. If there were substantial irregularities in an election that could affect the outcome, it would be resolved in court. Experts are confident that the winners of elections will be the ones seated.Despite that confidence, there’s still concern that refusals to certify will allow people to continue to question the election results and seed further doubt about the election.What happens after certification?In a presidential election, there are additional steps after states certify the vote.In nearly every state, the winner of the statewide vote gets all of the state’s electors to the electoral college. A new law, the Electoral Count Reform Act, requires the governor of each state to certify the list of their state’s electors no later than six days before the electoral college meets. This year, that means the electors will be finalized by 11 December and the electors will meet in state capitols across the country on 17 December.Once the electors meet and cast their votes, they transmit them to the National Archives in Washington. Congress will oversee the counting of the vote on 6 January 2025 to make the results official. The constitution says that the president of the Senate – the vice-president – will oversee counting of the votes. That means that Kamala Harris will oversee the counting of the vote this year. Harris, who conceded the election to Trump on Wednesday, said in her concession speech that she “will engage in a peaceful transfer of power”. More

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    Fraud, lawsuits, chaos: how Trump is preparing to contest the 2024 election

    Donald Trump has left little doubt that he will contest the results of the 2024 election if he loses.Election lawyers and voting rights experts are bracing for an aggressive effort by the former president in the days after the election to challenge the results while votes are still being counted. But unlike 2020, when Trump’s effort after the election seemed a bit haphazard, experts say they’re seeing a much more organized effort that stretches from the courts to local groups organizing election deniers to work the polls.Here are a few key ways Trump is preparing to contest the 2024 vote:Seeding doubt about fraudFor months, Trump and allies have been spreading the false idea that there is fraud impacting the election.On the campaign trail, Trump has seized on a report that officials in Lancaster county are investigating a batch of 2,500 voter registration applications for possible fraud. The district attorney has said that investigators have discovered some fraudulent applications, but has not said how many or the nature of the fraud. Trump has distorted that limited information to claim that there are fraudulent votes. “They‘ve already started cheating, 2,600 votes, he said. Every vote was written by the same person. It must be a coincidence,” he said at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, last Tuesday.Nationally, a key pillar of Republicans’ claims has been the falsehood that non-citizens are voting and could sway the election. Elon Musk, the billionaire who is a key Trump ally in the campaign, has played a significant role in amplifying this claim. Several studies have shown that non-citizen voting is extremely rare.“If the fraud theme of 2020 was: ‘Covid is allowing ineligible people to vote or ballots to be manipulated,’ the 2024 theme seems to be ‘illegals are voting,’ and that fits in very much with the kind of nativist anti-immigrant language coming from the top of the Republican ticket,” Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in an interview in October.Lawsuits, lawsuits, lawsuitsOver the last few months, the Republican National Committee and other GOP-aligned groups have filed a number of lawsuits in swing states claiming that states are not properly monitoring their rolls for ineligible voters. They have made eye-popping claims, including that states have more registered voters than eligible citizens and that non-citizens are on the rolls.Many of these suits have already been dismissed. But even though Republicans are losing the cases, voting rights experts see an ulterior motive in filing them.“The underlying claims in the suits are based on totally unreliable data, shoddy methodology, and basically the claims are garbage,” Ben Berwick, a lawyer at the watchdog group Protect Democracy. “They are also, in this case, brought by election deniers, in an attempt to spread a false narrative to mislead the public and undermine confidence in elections.”

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    Sean Morales-Doyle, the director of the voting rights program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said that he sees the lawsuits as an effort to give an imprimatur of legal authority to false claims.“I do think you’re going to see after the election if people are upset about the outcome, pointing to: ‘We’ve been saying for the last eight months that they had bloated rolls and dead people on the rolls, non-citizens on the rolls, and the courts didn’t do anything about it,’” he said.Berwick and his colleagues have referred to the cases as “zombie lawsuits” that Trump and allies could try and point to again after the election. While experts are confident this won’t succeed because the claims will still be false, it could continue to seed doubt and provide a pretext for local officials to try and refuse to certify the vote.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSowing chaos during a long vote countJust like in 2020, it is unlikely that the US will know the winner of the election on election night. State laws in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, two swing states, still prohibit election officials from counting mail-in votes until election day, and election officials are already setting expectations that counting could last long past Tuesday.Trump plans to declare that the vote against him is rigged and point to the slow vote count as evidence, Rolling Stone magazine reported in October.Pressure on local election officials not to certify the voteIf Trump loses the election, there will likely be enormous pressure put on local election officials not to certify the results of the election.Long overlooked, certification is the bureaucratic process of making official the vote tallies at the local and state level. Those charged with certifying the vote are typically boards composed of elected or appointed officials. If a candidate wants to challenge the election results, states allow them to do so in separate legal processes outside of certification.Certification has long been considered a mandatory, non-discretionary responsibility. But in 2020, the Trump campaign and allies targeted Republicans at the local and state level and pressured them not to certify the results. None of those efforts worked in 2020, but Republicans have spent the last four years targeting positions that hold power over certification. At least 35 officials who have refused to certify elections since 2020 will have a role over certifying the vote this fall, according to a report by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), a watchdog group.Voting litigators are preparing to go to court to force local officials to certify, and they say that the law is unequivocally on their side. More

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    Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes: ‘We want to make America hate again’

    The founder of the Proud Boys, the far-right group that played a major role in the January 6 riot at the US Capitol and was memorably instructed by Donald Trump to “stand back and stand by”, has told the makers of a Trump documentary: “We want to make America hate again.”Gavin McInnes, the UK-born British Canadian citizen who co-founded Vice magazine and was influential in the New York hipster scene of the early 2000s before becoming a far-right militia figure, also claimed to the BBC that his group wasn’t responsible for what happened that day.“It was you,” he told the makers of the documentary, which has aired on the BBC’s Panorama strand. “If anyone should apologise … it should be the corrupt leftwing media, and I’ll accept your apology now if you want to do it.”The program – Trump: A Second Chance? – talks to ardent Trump supporters about their enduring support for the New York property developer and reality TV show figure who faced two impeachment inquiries during four years in office and has been indicted in four separate criminal cases since, including being found guilty of 34 felony counts.Polls suggest an exceptionally tight US presidential race, with the final few days of campaigning before next week’s vote characterized by Democrats’ claims that a second Trump term would plunge the US into a period of neo-fascism.At a packed Trump rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday, the speakers rotated between patriotism and grievance, including a podcaster who called the unincorporated US territory of Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”, made lewd comments about Latinos, depicted Jews as cheap and Palestinians as rock-throwers.McInnes, designated a “terrorist entity” by the Canadian government and described by Vanity Fair as “one of our era’s most troubling extremists”, was not at the January 6 protest. But about 50 members of the Proud Boy group faced charges for their part in the insurrection, which was staged to prevent the certification of the 2020 election.The Proud Boys chair, Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, 39, of Miami, Florida, was sentenced to 22 years in prison last year after being convicted of seditious conspiracy and other charges.The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said the sentences that the Proud Boy members received reflected “the danger their crimes pose to our democracy” and Tarrio had “learned that the consequence of conspiring to oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power”.McInnes resigned from the Proud Boys in November 2018 after 10 members were charged in connection with a brawl on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But in 2022, he was pictured in a black hoodie embroidered with the gold Proud Boy logo.McInnes said on his Get Off My Lawn podcast that he was wearing the Proud Boy regalia “as an homage to our brothers behind bars”.Last month, McInnes was scheduled to speak at dinner hosted by Uncensored America, a student organization at the University of South Carolina. The invitation misspelled Kamala Harris’s first name in a sexually suggestive way, the news station WIS 10 reported.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMcInnes’s planned appearance at the event sparked controversy over free speech on campus. A petition protesting against the event argued it contributed to “overall negative environment that the university continues to allow”.In response, McInnes said he would not be the one bringing hate to the event, and repeated the sentiment he offered to Panorama.“If you’re looking for violence you’re looking on the wrong side of the political spectrum. The left are the violent ones. They burnt down this country for two years straight. We had one riot on January 6,” he said.He said the dinner, a “roast” in colloquial terms, was set to “make fun of what could be the worst president in American history”, referring to Harris’s candidacy.The impending election is predicted in polls to fall along gender lines. Polls show men are more likely to say efforts to promote gender equality have gone too far and plan to vote for Trump. Women are more apt to say those efforts haven’t gone far enough, and plan to vote for Harris. The margins for each are split roughly 60-40. More

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    The US is ‘absolutely’ ready for a female president, Harris says in NBC interview

    Kamala Harris said that she has no doubt that the US was ready for a female president, insisting that Americans care more about what candidates can do to help them, rather than presidential contenders’ gender.The vice-president’s statement came during an interview with NBC News’s Hallie Jackson, who asked whether she thought the country was ready for a woman, and a woman of color, to be in the Oval Office. “Absolutely,” Harris said. “Absolutely.”“In terms of every walk of life of our country,” Harris said, “part of what is important in this election is really, not really turning the page – closing a chapter, on an era that suggests that Americans are divided.“The vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us and what the American people want in their president is a president for all Americans,” she said.Harris was asked why she hasn’t leaned into the historic nature of her candidacy – that she is a woman of color running for the presidency.“I’m clearly a woman. I don’t need to point that out to anyone,” Harris said with a laugh. “The point that most people really care about is: can you do the job and, do you have a plan to actually focus on them?”“That is why I spend the majority of my time listening and then addressing the concerns, the challenges, the dreams, the ambitions and the aspirations of the American people,” Harris continued, saying that Americans deserve a president focused on them, “as opposed to a Donald Trump, who is constantly focused on himself”.Harris also said she was aware that Trump might potentially try thwarting the presidential election results, noting that her team “will deal with election night and the days after as they come”.Harris said that she is focused on campaigning over the next two weeks while noting “we have the resources and the expertise and the focus” on any potential threats to election results. Jackson noted that Trump declared victory before all the votes were tallied in 2020.Trump, who has refused to accept the 2020 election results and claimed the race was stolen, has been stoking fears with unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud in the 2024 cycle. “This is a person, Donald Trump, who tried to undo the free and fair election, who still denies the will of the people who incited a violent mob to attack the United States Capitol, and 140 law enforcement officers were attacked, some who were killed. This is a serious matter,” Harris told Jackson.Trump supporters on 6 January 2021 stormed the US Capitol in an effort to prevent certification of Joe Biden’s victory. That day, four people died at the Capitol and a police officer working during the insurrection died several days later; four other police officers posted at the building on 6 January 2021 committed suicide, according to CBS News.“The American people are, at this point, two weeks out, being presented with a very, very serious decision about what will be the future of our country,” Harris also said.Jackson also asked about voters’ concerns about the economy, noting that many blame the US president for rising prices.Harris said her policies “will not be a continuation of the Biden administration” and with inflation, “I bring my own experiences, my own ideas to it.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJackson noted that if Harris won, her victory might coincide with Republican control of Congress, which would thwart protecting abortion at the national level.“What concessions would be on the table?” Jackson asked.“I don’t think we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body,” Harris said.Harris said she would not “get into those hypotheticals” when asked if a pardon might be on the table for Trump.“I’m focused on the next 14 days.”Harris was pressed on the pardon topic, asked if she thought it could help the country move forward together and be less divisive.“Let me tell you what’s going to help us move on: I get elected to president of the United States.” More

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    Republican top Georgia elections officer says voting integrity lies hurt his party

    Georgia’s top elections official says he believes Republicans’ claims of doubting the integrity of the vote in November’s presidential election “will really hurt” their party’s chances at the poll.In an interview on Sunday with NewsNation, the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, defended the election process he oversees amid the casting of a record number of early votes in recent days. His comments came after the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Raffensperger’s fellow Republican, posted claims on X that a voting machine had misprinted a voter’s selections to the detriment of her party.Raffensperger, who took office in 2019, said that “spreading stories like that” will “really hurt our turnout on our side”.“I’m a conservative Republican, so I don’t know why they do that, it’s self-defeating,” Raffensperger added. “You know, you can trust the results.”Georgia, a battleground state, has been a central focus for Republicans in their unfounded claims of voter fraud. During the 2020 election, after Joe Biden won Georgia by a close margin and took the presidency from Donald Trump, Raffensperger announced a ballot recount. That recount confirmed that Biden had won the election.Ever since, legal and political showdowns have placed the state as a central focus for Trump’s attempt to return to the White House in a contest against the vice-president, Kamala Harris.Recent court rulings in Georgia have pushed back on Republican-led attempts to change how the state handles its elections.The Georgia state election board, a relatively obscure five-person panel primarily made up of Trump-aligned Republicans, passed a number of rules that would significantly change how the state handles its political races. The most controversial proposal sought to obligate poll workers to hand-count paper ballots on election night.Nonetheless, Georgia judges ruled against implementing those changes after Raffensperger warned they could lead to disrupting the certification of the election, confusion and delays. Georgia’s Republican party has appealed.More than 1 million voters have already cast their ballots in Georgia, cementing its status as a swing state in the race between Harris and Trump.After the 2020 elections, Trump-aligned Republicans lied that their candidate lost to Biden because of voter fraud. Fervor over those lies culminated in Trump supporters’ attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Raffensperger at one point received a phone call directly from Trump pressuring him to “find” him enough votes to prevent Biden from winning Georgia, though the secretary of state rebuffed him.

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    Georgia state prosecutors later filed criminal charges against Trump over his attempts to overturn the outcome of the presidential election there, all of which are part of the many legal problems that the former president has been confronting while running for the White House again.In an interview with the New York Times earlier in October, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, refused to answer whether the former president lost the 2020 election. Vance later clarified that he did not think Trump lost the 2020 race, saying: “So did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use.”Raffensperger on Sunday maintained Georgia was “ranked number one” for election integrity by organizations on both sides of the political spectrum.“That just shows you we’re doing the right thing,” Raffensperger said. “Voters trust the process we have in Georgia. It’s easy to vote. It’s hard to cheat.” More

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    JD Vance falsely claims Donald Trump didn’t lose 2020 election

    The Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, told a reporter on Wednesday that there were “serious problems” in the 2020 election and suggested for the first time that the then president Donald Trump did not actually lose the race.“Did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use,” Vance said in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. “But look, I really couldn’t care less if you agree with me or disagree with me on this issue.”He was pressed on his response by a reporter later in the day on another campaign stop in Wilmington, North Carolina, saying: “I think that big tech rigged the election in 2020. That’s my view. And if you disagree with me, that’s fine.”The response comes in the wake of a non-response earlier this month, when during an interview with the New York Times, Vance was given five opportunities to “acknowledge that Trump did not win in 2020” and he “refused to say so”.Trump notably lost the 2020 election and currently faces numerous charges related to election interference after being found guilty in May 2024 on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a New York hush-money trial.The Harris campaign criticized Vance’s responses to the question about the 2020 election.“There we have it – JD Vance finally admitted he denies the 2020 election results,” a Harris campaign spokesperson, Matt Corridoni, said in a statement. “As Governor Walz said on the debate stage weeks ago, Donald Trump selected Vance for this exact reason – he knows Vance will be a loyal soldier in Trump’s pursuit for absolute, unchecked, limitless power.”Previously, Vance has sidestepped answering the question directly, deflecting when pressed by the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Tim Walz, during a debate if Trump lost the 2020 election. He also downplayed the insurrection on 6 January, 2021.

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    “Tim, I’m focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their minds in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?” Vance said.In September 2024, during a podcast interview, Vance responded to a question on what he would have done differently than the former vice-president Mike Pence in January 2021: “I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we had.”Vance was once a critic of Trump, comparing him to Hitler ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He shifted toward backing Trump’s election denial claims as he vied to be his running mate.Shortly before joining the Trump campaign, Vance claimed in an interview with the ABC News This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos: “Mike Pence could have done more, whether you agree or disagree, Mike Pence could have done more to sort of surface some of the problems in the 2020 election.”Trump has claimed there will be a “bloodbath” if he does not win the 2024 election. He also claimed his supporters will not have to vote any more if he wins as Trump and his allies have laid the foundation to contest the 2024 election results. More

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    Georgia election rules passed by Trump-backed board are ‘illegal’, declares judge

    A Georgia judge has declared that seven new election rules recently passed by the state election board are “illegal, unconstitutional and void”.Fulton county superior court judge Thomas Cox issued the order Wednesday after holding a hearing on challenges to the rules. The rules that Cox invalidated include three that had gotten a lot of attention – one that requires that the number of ballots be hand-counted after the close of polls and two that had to do with the certification of election results.Cox found that the rules are “unsupported by Georgia’s Election Code and are in fact contrary to the Election Code”. He also wrote that the state election board did not have authority to pass them. He ordered the board to immediately remove the rules and to inform all state and local election officials that the rules are void and not to be followed.The Associated Press has reached out to the lawyers for the state election board, as well as the three Republican members who had supported the rules, seeking comment on the judge’s ruling. They could appeal but time is running short with less than three weeks to go until election day.The state election board, which is controlled by three Republicans endorsed by Donald Trump, has passed numerous rules in recent months mostly dealing with the processes that happen after ballots are cast. The former president narrowly lost Georgia to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election but claimed without proof that widespread fraud cost him victory in the state.Democratic party organizations, local election officials and a group headed by a former Republican state lawmaker have filed at least half a dozen lawsuits over the rules. Democrats, voting rights groups and some legal experts have raised concerns that some rules could be used by Trump allies to delay or avoid certification or to cast doubt on results if he loses next month’s presidential election to Kamala Harris.Cox’s ruling came in a lawsuit filed by Eternal Vigilance Action, which was founded and led by former state representative Scot Turner, a Republican. The organization had argued that the state election board overstepped its authority in adopting the rules.Reached by phone Wednesday evening, Turner said he was “thrilled with the victory”.“It was a complete and total victory for the constitution of the United States,” he said. “These rules were opposed by citizens that are Republican, as well as Democrats and independents. This is not about party. It’s about doing what’s constitutional and re-establishing separation of powers, and that’s something that every conservative in this country should be concerned with and support.”One new rule that the judge blocked requires that three separate poll workers count the number of election day ballots by hand to make sure the number of paper ballots matches the electronic tallies on scanners, check-in computers and voting machines.Georgia voters make selections on a touchscreen voting machine that prints out a piece of paper with a human-readable list of the voter’s choices as well as a QR code. That is the ballot that the voter puts into a scanner, which records the votes. The hand-count would be of the paper ballots – not the votes.Critics, including many county election officials, argued that a hand-count could slow the reporting of election results and put an extra burden on poll workers at the end of an already long day. They also said there isn’t enough time to adequately train poll workers.Fulton county superior court judge Robert McBurney on Tuesday had temporarily blocked the hand-count for the November election while he considers the legal merits. He said the hand-count may ultimately prove to be good policy, but it’s too close to the general election to implement it now.Cox wrote that the rule “is nowhere authorized” by Georgia laws, which “proscribe the duties of poll officers after the polls close. Hand-counting is not among them”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTwo other new rules that Cox invalidated were passed by the state election board in August and have to do with certification. One provides a definition of certification that includes requiring county officials to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying results, but it does not specify what that means. The other includes language allowing county election officials “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections”.Supporters argued those rules are necessary to ensure the accuracy of the vote totals before county election officials sign off on them. Critics said they could be used to delay or deny certification.The first certification rule is not part of Georgia law and “adds an additional and undefined step into the certification process”, Cox wrote, saying it is thus “inconsistent with and unsupported by” Georgia law, making it “void and unenforceable”. The second rule is “directly inconsistent” with Georgia law, “which provides the time, manner, and method in which election-related documents must be produced and maintained”, he wrote.The other rules Cox said are illegal and unconstitutional are ones that: require someone delivering an absentee ballot in person to provide a signature and photo ID; demand video surveillance and recording of ballot drop boxes after polls close during early voting; expand the mandatory designated areas where partisan poll watchers can stand at tabulation centers; and require daily public updates of the number of votes cast during early voting.At least half a dozen lawsuits had been filed challenging some or all of the new rules. The Democratic National Committee and the Democratic party of Georgia had filed two lawsuits and joined others. Election boards in some counties and individual election officials in other counties had also sued. More