Georgia Supreme Court rejects Republican-led effort to restore new election rules

As early voting begins in the battleground state of Georgia, the Supreme Court of Georgia has denied a Republican-led attempt to reinstate seven new election regulations that were passed by the State Election Board prior to Election Day. The court unanimously rejected a plea for an accelerated appeal and refused to reinstate the regulations in a one-page order released Tuesday. The court refused to expedite the procedures, but it did not dismiss the appeal. “When the appeal is docketed in this court, it will proceed in the ordinary course,” the four justices wrote.

The Georgia ruling on Tuesday represents a win for Democrats who sued to overturn the regulations that Republicans had asked be brought back into effect. Additional regulations would have forced election officials in each county to perform a “reasonable inquiry” into the results prior to certifying them, as well as increased the number of locations poll monitors could visit.

Last Thursday, Judge Thomas Cox of the Fulton County Superior Court referred to the restrictions as “illegal, unconstitutional, and void.” The decision was challenged to the state Supreme Court by the Georgia Republican Party and the Republican National Committee. Republicans’ lawyers told the court last week that the stay issue decision “essentially decides whether these new regulations will be in effect for early voting, and possibly for the 2024 election altogether.”

More than 300,000 ballots were cast during Georgia’s advanced voting, which began on October 15 and broke turnout records. Georgia is one of seven swing states with three weeks of early voting. Georgia state election administrator Gabriel Sterling reported that as of Tuesday, over a quarter of Georgia’s active voters have cast ballots. Georgia has 16 electoral votes, and the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, is competing with the Republican contender, former President Donald Trump. In 2020, President Joe Biden became the first Democrat to win Georgia since 1992 when he defeated Trump by 12,670 votes.

The regulations would have mandated that election workers manually count the ballots at every polling station and that drop boxes at early voting locations be monitored after hours. Democrats contended that the implementation of new regulations so near to the election would not give time for election worker training and that a hand count would cause a delay in the election results. “The idea is to muddy the waters over election workers and confuse voters to put out this idea that the election will be up to debate and potentially impacted by fraud,” Senior staff lawyer Michael Adame of the Election Protection Hub of the Public Rights Project,