ATLANTA — State and national Republicans are asking a federal judge to step in and stop five Georgia counties from counting absentee ballots that were hand-delivered over the weekend.
That Fulton judge held an emergency hearing Saturday and said Georgia law permits hand-delivering absentee ballots to county offices.
Now, the Republicans want the feds to weigh in and they’ve added more counties to their suit.
The lawsuit was filed in Savannah and targets five Democratic-leaning counties: Fulton, Cobb, DeKalb, Gwinnett, Clayton, and Chatham.
They contend that collecting those ballots over the weekend violated the Constitution.
“Voters in counties that are not opening their offices this weekend are thus less likely to cast effective votes because they have fewer days to do so,” they said.
But on Saturday, a Fulton County judge said that wasn’t the case at all.
In a virtual hearing, he ruled that Georgia law permits counties to accept hand-delivered ballots.
Fulton County Elections Board Chair Sherri Allen told Channel 2′s Richard Elliot on Monday that they’re following the law.
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“Those lawsuits, we have been victorious in those because we have been following the law and we have been prepared and we’ve been doing the right thing,” Allen said.
Elliot also spoke with election law attorney Bryan Sells about the suit.
He thinks Georgia law is clear and that the federal lawsuit will fail, too.
“The judge found that this procedure is allowed under Georgia law. It is, it’s very clear in the statute that voters can return their absentee ballots by hand to an elections office,” Sells said.
At a pre-election day news conference, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger sidestepped the controversy but added he wished those counties had given more notice that that’s what they were going to do.
“Right now, we’re just waiting for that to work its way through the court system. We’ll follow the law, and that’s what we always do,” Raffensperger said.
There is no word when that federal court judge will make their decision.
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