A Republican member of the election board in Georgia's Fulton County is refusing to certify May 21 primary election results, demanding that she first be given unusual access to “essential election materials and processes."
According to the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the official, Julie Adams, wants "lists of all qualified county electors showing those who signed in at polling locations as well as those who returned absentee ballots, the numbers of votes cast on particular machines and during advance voting, information on provisional and “drop box” ballots, digital images of ballots as they were cast, and all absentee ballot applications and envelopes, among other data."
The rogue board member was a former director of the conservative Tea Party Patriots and one of two people nominated to the five-person board by the Fulton County Republican Party. Though her move to abstain and file a lawsuit did not stop the board from voting to certify last week's election, Adams has caused alarm as former President Donald Trump and members of the Republican Party routinely threaten to overturn elections that do not go their way.
Adams has asserted that “the board has not and clearly should be monitoring our elections," and that "it’s time to fix the problems in our elections.”
Aaron Johnson, a Democratic member of the board, noted that Fulton County, which encompasses the city of Atlanta, is the most heavily watched county in Georgia, and that the board's certification is part of a long process to ensure the election was legitimately conducted. “The State (Election) Board still has to certify,” he said. “It’s a continual process, it’s not something that ends today. The problem that we have in Fulton County is the continuous misrepresentation of what actually is going on.”
Last Friday, the Georgia Democratic Party and Democratic National Committee stepped in to foil the case, which Georgia party chair and U.S. representative Nikema Williams said was a "transparent attempt to set the stage" for a fight to block certification for the 2024 presidential election if Trump is defeated. He and 18 co-defendants are already being charged in an alleged scheme to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, where Joe Biden beat Trump by just under 12,000 votes.
Adams and her lawyers say that a ruling in her favor by Fulton County Superior Court Chief Judge Ural Glanville would be "consistent with Georgia’s policy of building public trust and confidence in Georgia’s elections.” She is also taking aim at the county elections director, who she said should not conduct an election “with no oversight or access” by the board.
In response, the director told Adams that she and other board members could have observed the "reconciliation" of election results before certification. The problem was that she did not seek the materials on time before the certification deadline.
