A ‘Recipe for Chaos’ in Georgia: Judge Weighs DNC's Push To Stop New Election Rules

A Georgia judge overseeing Democrats’ challenges to new election rules created by the state’s Republican-majority election board seemed less than enthused about the idea of tossing out those rules on Tuesday, even as Democratic lawyers argue they could cause chaos in November.

The rules, implemented in August, gave county election officials in Georgia permission to launch vaguely-defined “reasonable” inquiries into contested election results and authority to broadly examine “all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections.” The Democratic National Committee, the Georgia Democratic Party and some individual voters sued the state election board and state Republicans over rules when the board voted 3-2 approving the new policies.

At Tuesday’s hearing in Fulton County, Judge Robert McBurney sought to establish some baseline facts at the top of the trial ― facts that may prove useful for the DNC’s lawyers to cite down the road.

The judge asked attorneys for both parties whether they could agree on three simple points about election law in Georgia from the outset: that certifying the election is mandatory; that certifying the election by the Nov. 12 deadline is also mandatory; and finally, that the state elections board lacks the authority to change rules around certification, including any move to remove certification requirements or move deadlines.

In a rare moment in any courtroom trial, every party initially agreed.

That consensus was strained, however, as the hearing went on.

Lawyer Kurt Kastorf, representing the Democratic voters who’d sued alongside the DNC, said the finality of the certification deadline was clear but exactly what the GOP rules now allow election officials to do was less