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

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      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

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      En caso de crisis electoral, esto es lo que debes saber

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      En 2020, cuando Donald Trump cuestionó los resultados de las elecciones, los tribunales rechazaron decisivamente sus intentos una y otra vez. En 2024, el poder judicial podría ser incapaz de salvar nuestra democracia.Los renegados ya no son principiantes. Han pasado los últimos cuatro años haciéndose profesionales, diseñando meticulosamente una estrategia en múltiples frentes —legislaturas estatales, el Congreso, poderes ejecutivos y jueces electos— para anular cualquier elección reñida.Los nuevos desafíos tendrán lugar en foros que han purgado cada vez más a los funcionarios que anteponen el país al partido. Podrían ocurrir en un contexto de márgenes electorales muy estrechos en los estados clave de tendencia electoral incierta, lo que significa que cualquier impugnación exitosa podría cambiar potencialmente las elecciones.Disponemos de unas pocas semanas para comprender estos desafíos y así poder estar alerta contra ellos.En primer lugar, en los tribunales ya se han presentado docenas de demandas. En Pensilvania se ha iniciado un litigio sobre si están permitidas las papeletas de voto por correo sin fecha y si se pueden permitir las boletas provisionales. Stephen Miller, exasesor de Trump, presentó una demanda en Arizona alegando que los jueces deberían tener la capacidad de rechazar los resultados de las elecciones.Muchos estados han cambiado recientemente su forma de votar. Incluso una modificación menor podría dar lugar a impugnaciones legales, y algunas invitan afirmativamente al caos.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Why are people leaving Trump rallies early? We asked them

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      The line to get into the Donald Trump rally snaked about a quarter-mile around the venue in Marietta, Georgia, on Tuesday, an hour before the event started.The hall, which seats 2,700 people, had already started filling up with supporters, the first of whom arrived around 1pm for the 7.30pm event. Not everyone was getting in.There’s no shortage of political enthusiasm in Georgia. Early voting opened on Tuesday, with 310,980 people casting a ballot in person according to the Georgia secretary of state’s office. The previous record was about 130,000. Few of Trump’s supporters sported “I voted” stickers.Though the energy before the rally was high, many have noted in recent months – including Kamala Harris during the presidential debate last month – that crowds at Trump rallies dwindle as his speeches turn into multi-hour rambles.“I’m going to actually do something really unusual and I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch,” Harris said during the debate. “You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”The Guardian tested that proposition on Tuesday.About three out of 10 people attending the rally left before Trump finished speaking at 10.14pm. In their defense, Trump was an hour and a half late.Seven minutes into Trump’s address, as he recited a litany of grievances about inflation, schools, the quality of cars, cities, immigration and the prospect of a third world war, a dozen people had already walked out.Twenty minutes in, as Trump was describing how “murderers” immigrating illegally posed a bigger threat to America than inflation, Ryan Taylor, a podcaster, headed to her car.“I live an hour away, and my son is waiting in the car,” she said. “He didn’t want to come in. He’s a teenager.” He’s 15, she said.View image in fullscreenHaley Lummus, of Jasper, Georgia, left at 9.22pm, just as Trump was describing Harris as the “taxing queen” and complaining about how his attacks on San Francisco depreciate the value of the property he owns there.“We had to wait a while, like to get him on stage,” she said. “Everyone was doing the wave, and there was a lot of people very excited to see him cheering.” Why was she leaving early? “I worked and I’m tired.”Perhaps 50 people had left by then.A group of five young men wearing brand-new red “Make America Great Again” baseball caps walked out just before 9.30, as Trump was claiming that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza would not have happened if he had been president. The five looked mildly bewildered and very slightly out of place, even there.“We’re from Denmark, and we don’t really care about American politics at all, but we wanted to experience American politics firsthand,” said Gustave. He and his friends were staying about 15 minutes away, heard about Trump’s appearance and said why not. They described the event as a “fever dream” and “something like The Bachelor” before heading off to beat traffic.Another 50 or so left over the next 10 minutes. Four of them were thrown out.“Some of us went in with flags to scream, ‘Free Palestine’.” said one young man who wouldn’t identify himself. Trump was talking about ending taxes on tips. “The flags got snatched from us. We got booed. We got kicked. I still support Trump though.” They complained that the burly security guard in front of them roughed them up, taunting him as they ambled on the periphery of the hall. A few minutes later, Secret Service agents arrested one of them.By 9.50, as Trump was talking about how the “migrant invasion” was “stealing American jobs”, a consistent stream of people hit the exits. Most said they had to work the next day, or had a babysitter to relieve. Marietta is a metro Atlanta city, while Trump’s base of support often lives in more rural communities a distance away.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenSeason Poole, once an army diesel mechanic, lives in Social Circle, Georgia. This was her second rally; she attended one in North Carolina two weeks ago, she said. As Trump described “alien gang members and migrant criminals from prison”, Poole contemplated schoolwork and an hour drive.At least 500 people had left by then. Voni Miller would have stayed if she could.

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      “He made me cry,” Miller said. “I cried when he was speaking about making changes. You know, closing the border, making changes. If Kamala wins we’re so screwed, because she can’t make up her mind about anything. It just made me cry because he’s giving up so much. He doesn’t have to do this for us. Like, you know what I mean. He has all the money, but he is still getting shot at, and people saying horrible things about him. But he’s doing it because he wants to make changes for America, and it was just so emotional.”So. Why leave?“I’m actually leaving early because my phone is dying and I have a Tesla so I can’t get in. It’s really upsetting, because it meant a lot to be here, and I just can’t get in my car.”By 10.05, as Trump was talking about how important it was for police officers to be shielded from civil suits in misconduct cases for “doing something good”, Trump had lost about a third of his audience.Stephen Rosenbaum was walking back to his car with his son at that point. “I think I get more out of these rallies than anything else, and I hope that other people do,” he said. “He shows the human side. You know, we watched the Butler rally live on television when it happened. It was terrible,” he said about the first assassination attempt on Trump. “But, you know, right before all those events took place, he said, Listen, we just want to make the country a better place.”Rosenbaum has been to several rallies, he said.“We wanted to see that, see it in real life. We want to see it live,” he said. But, you’re not staying for the whole thing? “He’s got to go to school tomorrow. And he’s gotten to the part now where, I mean, we’ve seen enough of these. We kind of know how it’s going to finish. We just wanted to see it live. You know?” More

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      in Elections

      Michelle Obama to Host a Rally to Encourage Voter Turnout in Georgia

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      Michelle Obama, the former first lady, plans to host a rally in Atlanta a week before Election Day, aiming to encourage young and nonwhite voters to head to the polls.Mrs. Obama is one of the Democratic Party’s most popular figures but is also one of its most elusive surrogates. She delivered an impactful speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, encouraging viewers to “do something” to help Vice President Kamala Harris defeat her Republican rival, former President Donald J. Trump, and delivering an emphatic takedown of Mr. Trump in the process.Unlike her husband, former President Barack Obama, she has not been involved in events since.The Oct. 29 rally, announced on Wednesday by Mrs. Obama’s nonpartisan voting-rights organization When We All Vote, is not expected to be the only event she participates in. The organization’s executive director, Beth Lynk, said in a statement that the event will “set the tone for the entire country — especially first-time voters — to vote early.”Mrs. Obama’s appearance will be aimed at bolstering activity in a state where officials have already reported record turnout for early voting. Nearly five million Georgians voted in 2020, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. carried the state by 12,670 votes, making him the first Democratic presidential nominee to win there since Bill Clinton, then the governor of Arkansas, in 1992.Mrs. Obama remains one of the best-known public figures in America, ranking third on a list of prominent people compiled by YouGov, a market research firm. (Her husband ranks sixth.) Since leaving the White House, Mrs. Obama has balanced a well-known distaste for politics with constant demands to be on the public stage stumping for Democrats.In 2016, Mrs. Obama made her first campaign appearance in support of Hillary Clinton, then the Democratic nominee, in mid-September. After that, she delivered a handful of speeches, including an appearance on the eve of Election Day. During the pandemic election season in 2020, she released her last speech in support of Mr. Biden in a video message on Oct. 6. More

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      Georgia Judge Blocks Hand-Counting of Election Ballots

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      The ruling was confined to the current election, halting the measure from going into effect for 2024 while the judge further weighs its merits in the future.A county judge in Georgia on Tuesday blocked a new rule mandating a hand count of election ballots across the state. Enacting such a sweeping change for the November election, he said, was “too much, too late.”Judge Robert C.I. McBurney did not, however, knock down the rule outright; his decision was confined to the current election, halting the rule from taking effect for 2024 while he further weighs its merits.The rule, passed last month by the State Election Board, would have required poll workers across Georgia to break open sealed containers of ballots and count them by hand to ensure that the total number of ballots matched the total counted by tabulating machines. (It would not have required officials to tally for whom the ballots were cast.)But Judge McBurney agreed with challenges from several county election boards that the rule was made too close to the election.“Clearly the S.E.B. believes that the hand count rule is smart election policy — and it may be right,” Judge McBurney said, using shorthand for State Election Board. “But the timing of its passage makes implementation now quite wrong.”The rule was one of many new election provisions approved in Georgia since summer that hewed closely to policy goals of right-wing election activists. It was a key achievement of the State Election Board, which has recently been governed by a 3-2 right-wing majority.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Georgia counties are mandated to certify elections, judge rules

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      Election certification is a mandatory duty, not discretionary, for county election officials in Georgia, a judge ruled on Tuesday, rejecting assertions made by a Republican elections official that elections board members could refuse to certify an election based on their suspicions of fraud or error.Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton county board of registration and elections, brought the suit earlier this year after abstaining from a vote to certify the May primary election. The America First Policy Institute, a legal thinktank that was formed by former Donald Trump advisers in the wake of Trump’s 2020 election loss to help lay legal groundwork for his potential return to office, joined the suit.Adams refused certification after claiming she had been denied access to a long list of elections documents. But Robert McBurney, Fulton county superior court judge, ruled that Adams was entitled to review documents quickly, but failing to provide those documents was not grounds for denying the certification of an election.“If election superintendents were, as plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so – because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud – refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced,” wrote McBurney in his ruling. “Our Constitution and our election code do not allow for that to happen.”The law uses the world “shall”, meaning certification is an order, McBurney wrote.“To users of common parlance, ‘shall’ connotes instruction or command: You shall not pass!” he wrote.Adams is the regional coordinator for south-eastern states in the Election Integrity Network (EIN), a national group that has recruited election deniers to target local election offices. EIN was founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who aided his efforts to overturn the election in Georgia and elsewhere.Adams’s suit aimed to overturn longstanding Georgia precedent that the act of election certification is “ministerial”, an administrative activity marking the end of an election. Elections disputes in Georgia have historically been managed through investigation by local district attorneys, the attorney general’s office and ultimately in court.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA bloc of Trump-aligned Republicans on Georgia’s state elections board have rejected that interpretation of the law and implemented changes to election policies allowing for an undefined “reasonable inquiry” by local elections officers before certification. Those changes are under challenge by Democratic leaders in separate court cases. More

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      Harris Sends a Secret Weapon to a Georgia Fish Fry: Bill Clinton

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      The smell of fried fish was lingering on Sunday afternoon, and there was Bill Clinton beneath a tree, wearing a Harris-Walz camouflage cap and edging closer and closer to his modest audience the longer he spoke.It was a fittingly intimate setting for Peach County, Ga., a county where elections are decided by mere hundreds of votes. And for Mr. Clinton, who rose to power as “the man from Hope,” drawing on his Arkansas roots, it was a chance to engage in a little homespun politicking before early voting begins Tuesday in Georgia, a key battleground state.“It’s going to come down to whether you are willing to do one more time what you did when you elected not only Joe Biden and Kamala Harris four years ago, but Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff,” Mr. Clinton said, referring to the two Democrats Georgia elected to the Senate. “And if you are, we will win. And if you are not, you will regret it for the rest of your life.”From a church service in Albany, where the former president reminisced about campaigning alongside the baseball great Hank Aaron, to the fish fry in Fort Valley attended by a few hundred people, Mr. Clinton used the opening hours of a two-day blitz to try to help Ms. Harris bump up her score wherever she can.The fish fry, in a predominantly rural area about two hours south of Atlanta, suggested few places were too small to seek votes — even for a former president.Former President Bill Clinton addresses the crowd at the Get Out The Vote Fish Fry in Fort Valley, Ga. on Sunday.David Walter Banks for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      This Election Will Need More Heroes

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      True political courage — the principled stand, the elevation of country over party pressure, the willingness to sacrifice a career to protect the common good — has become painfully rare in a polarized world. It deserves to be celebrated and nurtured whenever it appears, especially in defense of fundamental American institutions like our election system. The sad truth, too, is the country will probably need a lot more of it in the coming months.In state after state, Republicans have systematically made it harder for citizens to vote, and harder for the election workers who count those votes to do so. They are challenging thousands of voter registrations in Democratic areas, forcing administrators to manually restore perfectly legitimate voters to the rolls. They are aggressively threatening election officials who defended the 2020 election against manipulation. They are trying to invalidate mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, even if they meet the legal requirements of a postmark before the deadline. They are making it more difficult to certify election results, and even trying to change how states apportion their electors, in hopes of making it easier for Donald Trump to win or even help him overturn an election loss.Though many of these moves happened behind closed doors, this campaign is hardly secret. And last month, Mr. Trump directly threatened to prosecute and imprison election officials around the country who disagree with his lies.Against this kind of systematic assault on the institutions and processes that undergird American democracy, the single most important backstop are the public servants, elected and volunteer, who continue to do their jobs.Consider Mike McDonnell, a Republican state senator from Nebraska, who showed how it’s done when he announced last month that he would not bow to an intense, last-minute pressure campaign by his party’s national leaders, including former President Trump, to help slip an additional electoral vote into Mr. Trump’s column.Currently, Nebraska awards most of its electors by congressional district, and while most of the state is safely conservative, polling shows Vice President Kamala Harris poised to win the elector from the Second Congressional District, which includes the state’s biggest city, Omaha. In the razor-thin margins of the 2024 election, this could be the vote that determines the outcome. That was the intent of Republican lawmakers in Nebraska, who waited until it was too late for Democrats in Maine, which has a similar system, to change the state’s rules to prevent one congressional district from choosing a Republican elector.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More