ATLANTA (CN) — A Georgia federal judge dismissed on Tuesday a challenge to provisions of a controversial GOP-sponsored election law that went into effect soon after the 2020 election, where President Donald Trump lost the state but disputed otherwise.
U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee rejected election integrity activists’ request to prohibit enforcement of certain provisions of Senate Bill 202 that are criminal in nature.
Pushed by Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp, the bill’s sweeping overhaul of the state’s election laws went into effect July 1, 2021. Many of the changes, which included permitting unlimited challenges to voter eligibility, shortening runoffs from nine weeks to four weeks, restricting the use of 24/7 drop boxes, and prohibiting people from passing out food and water to voters waiting in line, have been challenged in court proceedings since.
A week after its enactment, Boulee refused to grant a preliminary injunction to block the law, citing concerns about changes to election administration rules mere days before runoff races in two special elections.
The Coalition For Good Governance, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization focused on election security and transparency, contested five provisions, including the suspension rule, which allows the State Election Board to suspend a local election superintendent or board of registrars for violations of law.
Members of the organization that serve as county election board members asserted the rule violates their due process procedural rights. Other voters argued that if a board is removed and not replaced in time, it could create a hurdle to voting and make them unable to register to vote.
“In the court’s view, this type of remote injury is precisely the kind of speculative harm that is insufficient to confer standing,” Boulee wrote.
Boulee, a Trump appointee, wrote that no officials have ever been suspended under the rule or are currently being considered for suspension, including any of the plaintiffs.
He added that the only county officials who have undergone a performance review are the members of the Fulton County Board of Elections and Registration and staff, who are not parties in the case. Regardless, that performance review was initiated by members of the General Assembly, not the election board, and suspension was not even recommended.
“In sum, because plaintiffs are unable to demonstrate that the threat of injury is both real and immediate, not conjectural or hypothetical, this court finds that plaintiffs lack standing to seek declaratory or injunctive relief as to any of their claims relating to the suspension rule,” Boulee wrote.
As for the other challenged provisions, Boulee wrote in the order that the activists “have failed to establish both traceability and redressability.”
He said that because no prosecutorial officials were listed in the suit, their concerns of facing potential criminal charges for violating the law cannot be fairly traced to the named defendants, which included Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
In their suit, the election activists failed to present evidence that the governor has any sort of special relationship to S.B. 202 and its enforcement, the judge wrote.
“Problematically for plaintiffs, every district attorney would still have the ability to bring criminal charges against plaintiffs,” he added.
Another provision at issue prohibits designated observers from communicating any information they see while monitoring the processing and scanning of the absentee ballots to anyone other than “an election official who needs such information to lawfully carry out his or her official duties.”
In the election activists’ view, the communication rule violates the First Amendment because it criminalizes talking about any information related to absentee ballot processing or scanning, including scanning machine malfunctions, unsecured ballots, mishandling of ballots, or improperly rejected ballots.
They further argued that it is “frequently not possible to vote in person” without appearing to violate a rule that criminalizes the intentional observation of an elector while casting a ballot due to the large size of voting machines and relatively small size of polling places.
Boulee noted that under Georgia law, it is up to county election officials to ensure that voting machine placement protects ballot secrecy.
His ruling also keeps in place two other challenged rules — one that prohibits people from tallying absentee ballots cast prior to polls closing and another that makes it a misdemeanor to photograph or record a voted ballot.