‘Wild west of election work’: How certification fights are already cropping up in battleground states

(CNN) — Georgia conservative Julie Adams spread conspiracies about election workers, concocted a baseless story about ballot couriers drinking beer and doing drugs while hoarding ballots, and boasted of her contentious relationship with local election officials.

Then, in February, Adams was sworn in as a member of the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections in Georgia. In one of her first acts, she sued the rest of the board and the elections director, claiming she should not be forced to certify election results “without access to all elements of the election materials”.

The dustup in Fulton County is just one example of the election certification fights already cropping up in battleground states, from Georgia to Michigan to Nevada this year.

The election officials who have refused to certify have said they’re guarding against election fraud or seeking information they believe is necessary to certify the results. But voting rights activists see the challenges as an effort to undermine faith in the election process and test out ways to contest the election results in November.

“Certification is kind of a new wild west of election work,” said Stephanie Jackson Ali, the policy director for the New Georgia Project voting rights group. “If you can hold up certification then it really brings into question, can the state certify as a whole? And that means, can we send our delegates for president?”

The roles of local election boards can vary, but broadly they oversee the administration of elections and act as a final check mark to certify the results. Already this year, though, Republicans on Washoe County’s Board of Commissioners in Nevada refused to certify local election results as did Republicans on a board of canvassers in Delta County, Michigan.

Ultimately, each board certified the results amid threats of legal repercussions if they failed to do so. Certification fights also popped up in 2022 and in 2020, though certification ultimately moved ahead in each of those instances.

Mike Berry, the executive director for the center for litigation at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, is representing Adams and dismissed the concern from voting rights activists.

“Miss Adams should have access to the data to be able to do her job,” Berry said, “and for people to take that and try to extrapolate conspiracy theories about what might happen in November I think is misplaced and overblown.”

From activist to board member

In 2021, Adams popped up at a Fulton County Commissioners meeting to raise unfounded claims about the 2020 election, namely that election workers fabricated tally sheets at a post-election audit and lamenting that specific names were redacted.

“The question that you now must answer is who falsified them?” Adams told the board.

The following year, Adams took to the podium at a right-wing training for poll workers and poll watchers and unfurled a baseless claim about how ballots returned to drop boxes are handled in Fulton County.

“At the beginning of early voting, these people that looked less than clean cut kept the ballots for two to three days,” Adams claimed. “So, I’m picturing these guys, they’re sitting in their apartments, they have their buddies over, they’re drinking beer, might be smoking pot and they’ve got the ballots there from Fulton County.”

As she encouraged other conservatives to get more involved in the election process, she pointed to her less-than-congenial relationship with local officials.

“I could never be a local task force leader because you’re supposed to get along with your board of elections,” Adams said. “They don’t like me.”

But by early 2024, she was being sworn in to serve on her local election board. She had been selected by the local Republican Party as one of the two Republicans to serve on the bipartisan, five-member board.

Adams has talked about working closely with Cleta Mitchell, a Republican attorney who was involved in Trump’s efforts to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. And Mitchell, in turn, has cheered Adams’ appointment this year.

“She’s been a leader,” Mitchell said in a June appearance on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s podcast. “You couldn’t have anybody more knowledgeable. She knows more about the election law and election code in Georgia than most lawyers in Georgia.”

Mitchell, in an email to CNN, slammed attempts to prevent board members like Adams from accessing information they deem necessary for certification. “It is saying to citizens, citizen observers, and citizen election board members:  just sit down, shut up, don’t ask any questions, you have no legal authority,” Mitchell wrote.

Fulton County has had legitimate problems running its elections and earlier this year the State Election Board reprimanded the county and ordered an independent election monitor because of issues that arose around the 2020 presidential election, including an incident where a batch of ballots were double-scanned during one of the 2020 recounts.

But the extensive reviews of Georgia’s 2020 election – which included two machine vote counts and one hand count— did not reveal evidence of widespread fraud. Evidence has not emerged showing tally sheets were tampered with or drop box ballots were improperly taken by couriers, in 2020 or in subsequent elections.

Berry, Adams’ attorney, said any of his client’s prior comments about Fulton County aren’t related to her current lawsuit.

“There is more than sufficient evidence to show that Fulton County is – whether it’s out of spite, revenge or just pure incompetence – is not allowing Miss Adams, the access to the information and the evidence that is necessary for her to do her job,” Berry said when asked by CNN about her prior comments about election workers and ballot couriers. “The other issues that are going on or have gone in Fulton County I think are irrelevant.”

Representatives for Fulton County declined to comment. But in her lawsuit, Adams demanded access to a wide variety of election information, ranging from the voter check-in list to poll tapes to ballot recap sheets. Election officials informed Adams she was requesting information that even the secretary of state did not require from the county post-election, according to court documents.

Stirring up chaos and confusion

Adams declined to speak directly to CNN. Her attorney said one of the reasons she declined to be interviewed is because she has faced threats of legal action.

Those sorts of legal threats have prompted many who contested certification in other states to drop their challenges so the process could move ahead.

In Adams’ case, because she is outnumbered on the board, her refusals to certify and abstentions have not actually blocked the certification of any results. But both political parties are closely watching the case, filed in Fulton County’s Superior Court, to see whether Adams’ arguments could gain traction and cause ripple effects in other Georgia counties where Republicans hold more sway.

“The damage is that it really does stir up some chaos and confusion in the election system and it stokes fear,” said Megan Bellamy, vice president for law and policy at the Voting Rights Lab. “It can really be the root of disinformation and misinformation around elections.”

Democrats and many voting rights experts have maintained that those tasked with election certification are serving a ministerial role – one they are required to carry out. But the Fulton County lawsuit is just one of the certification issues bubbling up in Georgia. The State Election Board is also considering changes that could allow board members to conduct inquiries and demand documents before certification.

‘Window dressing’

In May, the Fulton County elections board convened to certify the results of the primary election earlier that month. Laid out across a table were baskets of envelopes with election information, along with several computers that contained specifics ranging from the election night summary report to the memory card chain of custody report. The piles of documents and row of computers contained some of the same information Adams had been requesting.

“I had the impression that we were going to do this, that it was going to be all paper documents,” Adams told the election director.

“The issue is, is that some of these files are huge. It would take us, like there are over 10,000 pages,” elections director Nadine Williams responded. “Therefore, everything is on a laptop.”

After pointing out that she wanted access to these materials before the day’s meeting, Adams pored over the available information for more than six hours.

As the meeting wrapped, she commended the board for taking “a step toward some transparency.” Then she slammed the panel as “window dressing.”

In the end, Adams abstained from certifying the results.

CNN’s Kimberly Berryman contributed to this report.

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