A Georgia court struck down a challenge to Georgia election law that critics warned could cause chaos.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ruled that certification of election results is mandatory under Georgia law, finding that no election board “may refuse to certify or abstain from certifying election results under any circumstances," reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“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,” McBurney wrote. “Our Constitution and our election code do not allow for that to happen.”
A growing number of Republican election board members have refused to certify election results since Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, and Fulton County election board member Julie Adams, a Republican, had sued the county challenging her duty under state law to certify election results.
Adams had argued that individual members should have the discretion to determine whether to certify results, saying that only county boards had the duty to certify and not individuals, but Burney quoted the wizard Gandalf from “The Lord of the Rings" to say that "shall" certify means board members mandatorily must certify.
“As only lawyers (and judges) can, we have muddied and mangled the meaning of the word ‘shall’ in our business,” McBurney wrote in a footnote. “To users of common parlance, ‘shall’ connotes instruction or command: You shall not pass!”
Election lawyer Marc Elias celebrated the ruling, calling it "a big defeat for election deniers in Georgia."