Georgia Supreme Court maintains block on controversial election rules from Trump allies

(CNN) — The Georgia Supreme Court won’t let the state election board enforce a slate of controversial new election rules that were passed by allies of Donald Trump, ruling Tuesday against Republicans who asked for them to be revived as early voting got underway in the critical battleground state.

The order is a major victory for Democrats and others who have filed a slew of lawsuits against the rules, arguing the board exceeded its authority when it passed them.

Among the seven rules is one that would require county election officials to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into election results before certifying them and another that would allow them to “examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections prior to certification of results.”

Other rules would have required officials to hand-count the number of ballots cast at each polling place on Election Day, expanded the number of areas poll watchers can access and required after-hour video surveillance of drop boxes at early voting locations.

Georgia, whose 16 electoral votes are crucial for both Trump and Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, has been seeing high early voter turnout in the 2024 election. State election official Gabriel Sterling said on Tuesday that 25% of the state’s active voters have already cast a ballot.

The unanimous decision from the conservative-majority court was technical; the justices did not rule on the legality of the seven rules but instead declined to pause a decision issued by a lower-court judge last week that struck them down.

The order from Georgia’s highest court means the State Election Board cannot direct local election officials to follow the rules while a legal challenge to them plays out before the court. And it guarantees that the rules won’t affect this election cycle.

The court on Tuesday also turned down a request from the Republicans for the justices to fast-track their review of the rules. The order said that the court would hear the case “in the ordinary course.”

The case was brought by the election advocacy group Eternal Vigilance Action. In siding with them last week, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox ruled that the seven rules “are illegal, unconstitutional and void” because, he concluded, the State Election Board did not have the legal authority to pass them in the first place.

The Republican National Committee and Georgia Republican Party, which intervened in the case to defend the rules, appealed the ruling to the state Supreme Court and later asked for the justices to step in on an emergency basis to revive the rules.

“This court’s ruling on the stay issue effectively decides whether these new regulations will be in effect for early voting, and possibly for the 2024 election altogether,” attorneys for the Republicans told the court last week.

Lawyers for Eternal Vigilance Action urged the court to maintain the block on the rules, saying that allowing the regulations to take effect this close to the election “will only sow greater confusion among voters and the local officials tasked with accurately tabulating their votes.”

Scot Turner, a former GOP state lawmaker who serves as the executive director of Eternal Vigilance Action, said on Tuesday that the court victories this week and last “should erase any doubt about the merits of our arguments” against the rules.

“I’m a Republican and this is a conservative policy organization. I do not like fighting my friends, but in this instance, fealty to the Georgia Constitution demands it,” he said in a statement. “True conservatives oppose empowering an administrative state that’s not directly accountable to voters. This is another win for principle that only the people’s elected constitutional officers have the power to make law.”

Democrats have also warned that some of the rules would inject post-election “chaos” into Georgia if they were allowed to take effect this year. Lawyers for state and national Democrats have said in separate lawsuits that the “reasonable inquiry” and “examination” rule, for example, could allow local election officials to delay or decline altogether to certify the election results.

In a separate challenge to the ballot hand count rule, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney temporarily paused the requirement last week, saying the “administrative chaos” that it would cause “is entirely inconsistent with the obligations of our boards of elections (and the SEB) to ensure that our elections are fair, legal, and orderly.”

This story has been updated with additional details Tuesday.

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