On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Eleanor L. Ross rejected a Republican lawsuit challenging electoral procedures in Georgia in the second similar defeat for Georgia Republicans in a single day. Georgia’s two incumbent Republican Senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, backed this second case in which plaintiffs sought to lower the threshold for setting aside mail-in ballots over concerns about signature matching, as POLITICO explained prior to the plaintiffs’ defeat. Under current rules, two out of three participating election workers need to agree that there’s an issue with a submitted signature before setting a mail-in ballot aside. The plaintiffs sought to change Georgia’s rule to require just one of the three on-hand election workers to conclude that there is a signature issue before setting a ballot aside.
BREAKING:
For the second time in one day, a federal judge in Georgia has REJECTED a GOP-led attack on absentee voting rules in the runoff election.
In case you missed the first: https://t.co/FSoehHGco4
Hearing recap in the thread below.
Story soon @LawCrimeNews 🔽 https://t.co/dzhZJn4K6O
— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) December 17, 2020
The net result of the Republican proposal could easily be higher numbers of unfairly scrutinized ballots. Although under both the current system and the Republicans’ proposed update, voters get a chance to “cure” (meaning fix) signature-related issues with their ballots, what if these voters miss notifications from authorities about the needed fix? What if some working class voters don’t even get reasonably enough time to “cure” their ballot before Election Day? In Thursday proceedings for the case with the support of Georgia’s two Senators, Perkins Coie attorney Amanda R. Callais, who was arguing on behalf of the Georgia Democratic Party, noted that “voters will be burdened with an additional cure process or be disenfranchised” in the event of a Republican victory in the case, as reporter Adam Klasfeld summarized.
Judge Ross concluded that the Republican Senators in the case did not actually have enough of an actual “injury” to grant them legal standing to bring the case in the first place. The “alleged potential future injury to the candidates is far too speculative to substantiate an injury in fact,” the judge observed, concluding that the “court does deny plaintiffs’ emergency motion for temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction and grants defendants’ consolidated motion to dismiss,” marking another GOP defeat.
In Thursday’s earlier dismissal of a Republican lawsuit over electoral procedures in Georgia, federal Judge James Randal Hall observed that Election Day for the ongoing Senate run-off elections in the state was far too imminent to appropriately allow for the changes that plaintiffs were seeking. Late-stage challenges to electoral procedures have been a repeating theme of the Republican fight against the electoral process in the United States. In one recently rejected Wisconsin case, the Trump campaign sought the invalidation of hundreds of thousands of ballots on the basis of an allegation that local authorities had mishandled the election. That particular case didn’t even allege any voter fraud among those Wisconsin voters, The New York Times noted — but the Trump campaign wanted to kick those voters out of the process anyway.
