In the Press

“Since 2020, we’ve seen a sustained effort to foment distrust in our election system and election results, and I think this is another effort to do more of that work,” said Jessica Marsden, a lawyer for Protect Democracy, a group that monitors threats against fair elections.

Every state does provide some mechanism, outside of the certification process, where voters or candidates can challenge election procedures or results. And in some states, that process can only take place after local certification, so local officials holding it up may be standing in the way of legitimate investigation.

Peter Simmons, a lawyer for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that works to protect the integrity of American elections, said that by dropping “and certify” from the rule, its meaning has arguably been reversed. Instead of emphasizing that certification is a mandatory duty regardless of any fraud or errors, the rule tries to grant county election board members discretion not to certify by leaving out the language that they “compute and certify,” according to Simmons.

But despite the mounting criticism of the board, even from other Republicans, it seems for the moment ready to plow ahead with additional rule changes — and unlikely to roll back the ones it just approved.

“There haven’t been any consequences yet for this unconventional behavior,” Peter Simmoms, Georgia Policy Strategist at the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy, told TPM. “There’s currently no reason for the board to act any differently.”

Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan, anti-authoritarianism group, has tracked 34 instances since 2020 of state or local election officials attempting to delay or deny election certifications in nine states. Six of those states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania – are considered electoral battlegrounds that could help determine the election’s result in November.

“If this rule is adopted, any claims of fraud, any claims of discrepancies, could be the basis for a county board member — acting in bad faith — to say, ‘I’m not confident in the results,’ and hold up certification under the flimsiest of pretexts,” said Ben Berwick, who leads the election law and litigation team of Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that works to protect the integrity of American elections.

“The bottom line here,” Berwick said, is that “election deniers are intentionally creating a failure point in the process where they can interfere if they don’t like the results of an election.”

Such efforts to challenge voters’ eligibility en masse are “inadequate to address voter eligibility by themselves and also redundant to the work already done by election officials,” according to research on the rise of mass voter challenges by Protect Democracy, a national nonpartisan group promoting fair elections and anti-authoritarian policies.