A judge in Georgia’s Fulton County ruled Monday that election board officials cannot “play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge” by refusing to certify election results based on their unilateral suspicions of fraud and more. The decision is a major setback for a Donald Trump-fueled effort to empower local officials to challenge or block election results in the state that polls show will be very close in November.
The effort was led by Republican Julie Adams, a Fulton County election board member who’s also part of the pro-Trump election denialist group known as the Election Integrity Network. It is headed up by Cleta Mitchell, one of Trump’s allies in his 2020 push to overturn Georgia’s election results.
Adams had refused to certify election results during Georgia’s general and presidential primaries this year. She was the sole member of the board to refuse; afterward, she sued, arguing that county election officials wouldn’t allow her to do her job or fulfill her oath by delaying her access to records and information that she deemed “essential.”
