Friday was supposed to be the deadline for officials in Georgia to certify the state’s election results, but who knows when that will actually happen. This week, a series of legal decisions have required counties to delay certifying their totals until certain provisional and absentee ballots have been counted. In that time frame, Democrat Stacey Abrams has picked up more votes and closed the gap needed to trigger a Dec. 4 runoff election or a recount in her race for governor against Republican Brian Kemp. However, questions loom as to whether she’ll really be able to pull it off—especially when Kemp is already declaring himself the winner and many counties are itching to certify their results now. No matter what happens, this election will forever be tainted with suspicion and claims of cheating. From that perspective alone, it would be worth forcing a runoff so that Georgia voters can be guaranteed a free and fair election.
Currently, the Abrams campaign is preparing a legal strategy to challenge the results should Kemp be declared the winner, and they are maintaining that they are “considering all options.” According to NBC News, Team Abrams’ lawyers are preparing a petition which includes sworn statements from Georgia voters and would-be voters who claim to have been disenfranchised.
Abrams would then decide whether to go to court under a provision of Georgia election law that allows losing candidates to challenge results based on "misconduct, fraud or irregularities ... sufficient to change or place in doubt the results."
In order to do this, Abrams would need to present a claim that the fraud, misconduct, or irregularities have a possible impact on up to 18,000 individuals who were not allowed to cast ballots or had their ballots thrown out. Her campaign believes that these were mainly minority and poorer voters. This emphasizes the ways that Kemp completely misused his position as Georgia’s secretary of state and tried to engineer the election in a way that marginalized certain voters and allowed him to declare victory.
The problem for the Abrams campaign is that they don’t actually have a list of 18,000 people whose votes were suppressed in order to prove this in court. But they do have hundreds—possibly thousands—of examples “along with data analysis of projected lost votes based on other problems, such as a lack of paper ballots at precincts where voting machines broke down and voters left long lines.”
To file the challenge, Abrams must do so within five days of the certified results and it would be filed either against Kemp directly or the person currently serving as secretary of state. That person would have up to 10 days to respond and a judge has another 20 days to schedule a hearing. That said, if all this were to happen, it could mean that Georgia won’t have an official governor-elect for quite some time.
It’s possible that a runoff will not happen if counties certify Kemp as the winner in the coming days. But Abrams is taking nothing off the table, and that means that this has the potential to go all the way to the state Supreme Court. Though it will take time, effort, and yield an uncertain result, it’s worth it to make sure all votes are counted and to ensure that Republicans cannot keep stealing elections. Every vote deserves to be counted and its un-American for Republicans to pick and choose who votes so that they can win. We should be grateful to the Abrams campaign for staying the course and doing their best to ensure the integrity of Georgia’s—and our country’s—electoral process.