Late-breaking Republican efforts to block absentee mail-in votes from being counted in Georgia in state and federal lawsuits have divided state judges and elections officials over the past few days.
In a win for former President Donald Trump on Monday, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that Cobb County may only count absentee ballots received by 7 p.m. on Election Day, reversing a ruling by a Cobb County judge on Saturday that had extended the deadline for returning ballots for three more days, reported Reuters.
Cobb County Superior Court Judge Robert Flournoy had extended the deadline for returning absentee ballots for a group of voters impacted by a delay by the county in mailing out the ballots. After a late surge of absentee ballot applications, the Cobb Board of Elections announced last Thursday it had failed to mail out all requested ballots in the required three-day turnaround time mandated by state law.
Despite the county’s effort to catch up by express mailing the ballots with prepaid express return envelopes late last week, more than 3,000 voters had not received their absentee ballots in the required time frame, according to the Marietta Daily Journal.
The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Georgia and Southern Poverty Law Center sued on behalf of three Cobb County residents and 3,240 others who had requested their absentee ballots in time but had not received their ballots as of last Thursday. Two of the named plaintiffs are attending college out of state, and one is a legally blind man for whom voting in person is “burdensome,” the lawsuit says.
In his order, Flournoy found that Cobb County’s delay in mailing the absentee ballots to the affected voters violated Georgia law and threatened to disenfranchise those voters from their constitutionally protected right to vote. He ruled that all ballots returned from the affected voters received by the county before 5 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 8, would be accepted.
But the Georgia Supreme Court’s ruling overturning that order means all ballots must now be mailed or handed in by Tuesday at 7 p.m. to be counted.
Cobb County, once a GOP-leaning suburb of Atlanta that has about 520,000 registered voters, has become a closely contested voting area in the battleground state of Georgia. President Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in Cobb County by more than 56,000 votes in 2020.
Former President Trump famously pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to “find” 11,780 votes needed to help him win Georgia’s electoral votes and the 2020 election. The outcome in Georgia this year’s election could be decided by an equally slim margin for either presidential candidate.
Trump and his team have already filed more than a 100 lawsuits challenging election processes in multiple states this year, including two last week in the swing state of Pennsylvania, a strategy many political observers believe is aimed at laying the groundwork for future claims of election fraud if he doesn’t win.
In another Georgia case this week, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Kevin Farmer on Saturday rejected a GOP lawsuit that tried to block voters in Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, from returning absentee ballots in person to election offices over the weekend.
In their complaint, the Republican National Committee argued that ballot drop boxes cannot be open beyond the early voting period, which ended on Friday, citing state election law.
But the law also says that voters can return absentee ballots in person to their county election offices until the polls close on election day, reported The New York Times.
Judge Farmer, reading from the law, said before dismissing the case, “That seems to indicate that personal delivery to the registrar and not to a drop box is kosher. And more than kosher, lawful.”
But that ruling didn’t dissuade the RNC and Georgia Republicans from filing a federal lawsuit on Sunday claiming that seven counties in Georgia had illegally kept their election offices open over the weekend to receive hand-delivered mail-in absentee ballots.
“The law is clear — the period of advance voting is over. But, that hasn’t stopped Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, Gwinnett, Athens-Clarke, Clayton and Chatham counties from announcing at the eleventh hour that they will open this weekend and Monday for voters to return absentee ballots,” the complaint says.
The federal lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia, contends the counties violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment “by granting special privileges to voters of those counties in violation of state law,” Law & Crime reported.
State officials dismissed the allegations in the federal lawsuit, noting that its chief legal arguments were already rejected by a state judge.
While gov't buildings can be used to receive absentee do you not know that "all drop boxes shall be closed when the advance voting period ends?" And worst, they were blatanting refusing monitors? Luckily the GA GOP and the RNC stepped in… pic.twitter.com/QnmPACDjqQ
— Elena Merino (@e_merino1) November 3, 2024
“To be clear, no election laws were broken in Georgia today,” Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for the Office of the Georgia Secretary of State, posted on X on Saturday night. “The law clearly states that [government] buildings can be used to receive absentee ballots. A judge said so this morning.”
Election offices in those seven Georgia counties continued accepting hand-delivered mail-in ballots over the weekend. Republicans are seeking a court order to have those ballots segregated pending the outcome of the lawsuits.
The Southern Poverty Law Center posted an update about the latest ruling on its X account Monday evening. The caption provided details to voters on steps to take to have their votes counted. The post received over 2,000 likes with many calling out Republicans.
How sad. Nothing scares Republicans more than free and fair elections
— TheOriginalJZ (@IAmTheJZ) November 4, 2024
“How sad. Nothing scares Republicans more than free and fair elections,” wrote one user on X. “This is disgusting,” shared another.
