Atlanta Attorney Lin Wood Jr., working with Sandy Springs lawyer Ray Smith and others who support President Donald Trump, last Friday filed a bombshell lawsuit in the U.S. District Court’s Northern District of Georgia. It charges that Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had no right last March to acquiesce to Democrat demands to add new rules in the checking of signatures on absentee ballots.
If Wood’s request for request for relief is granted, it would mean the presidential election ballot certification for Georgia would be put off until the problem of handling absentee ballots is handled. This (pdf) is the entire lawsuit cited as Wood v. Raffensperger et el (20-cv-04651).
Under a March litigation settlement that Raffensperger agreed to with the Democratic Party of Georgia, if the registrar or absentee ballot clerk determines that the voter’s signature on the mail-in absentee ballot envelope doesn’t match signatures on file, that reviewer must seek two others to also view it. Then a majority of those reviewers must agree that the signature doesn’t match in order for the ballot to be invalidated.
Wood says that such a rule change should have gone before the General Assembly for approval, but instead was ordered arbitrarily by Raffensperger with the approval of only one party. Under the U.S. Constitution – as this link shows– only state legislatures and Congress can prescribe such election changes.
The lawsuit says the new process creates confusion, is more cumbersome “and it makes it much more difficult to follow the statute with respect to defective absentee ballots.” Wood argues that the state officials were unauthorized to change the manner of processing absentee ballots in a way that was contrary with the state election code, therefore the counting of absentee ballots for the general election in the state is “improper and must not be permitted.”
According to the settlement agreed to by Raffensperger, county officials are required to form a committee of three people if any one official believes an absentee ballot is defective because the voter’s signature on the ballot envelope does not match the signature on file. If a majority in the committee determines that the signature does not match, it can then “reject” the ballot.
Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs, in response, calls the suit a “silly baseless claim.” Fuchs told 11 Alive “signature match is intact and the General Assembly passed legislation to allow voters who failed to include a signature time to add one. … We strengthened signature match, and will continue to do so, period.”
Wood’s arguments before the Georgia federal court, by the way, are similar to a Pennsylvania case awaiting a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Republicans there are asking the nation’s high court to review a state Supreme Court ruling that requires election officials to accept absentee ballots received up to three days after Nov. 3. Republicans argue that the court’s extension violates the Constitution as the decision to extend the deadline belongs to the state legislature and not the courts.
Finally, also in Georgia last week, the Trump campaign raised objections to what it deemed weak ballot security and poll watcher rules. But Raffensperger’s office gave no sign it would change those procedures.
