By Reuters

November 5, 20244:36 AM GMT+6Updated 9 hours ago

• A person picks up a sticker while voters head to a polling station as Georgians turned out a day after the battleground state opened early voting, in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., October 16, 2024. REUTERS/Megan Varner/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights

WASHINGTON, Nov 4 (Reuters) – The top court in the battleground state of Georgia ruled on Monday that Cobb County cannot extend the deadline for counting about 3,000 absentee ballots that were sent out shortly before Election Day, handing a victory to the Republican National Committee and presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Siding with the RNC, the Georgia Supreme Court overturned a judge’s ruling extending the deadline until Friday in Cobb County, located in suburban Atlanta. The court decided that only absentee ballots that arrive by 7 p.m. ET on Tuesday (0000 GMT Wednesday) can be counted.

Civil rights groups had sued last week seeking to extend the deadline, arguing that the county violated state law by failing to promptly send out about 3,000 absentee ballots. County officials said they were overwhelmed by a surge in requests.

The Republican National Committee had argued that extending the deadline would violate state law.

“Election Day is Election Day – not the week after,” RNC Chair Michael Whatley wrote in a post on social media.

Cobb County is a large and racially diverse area in Atlanta’s northern suburbs. The county voted for Democrat Joe Biden over Trump by 14 percentage points in the 2020 election. Biden defeated Trump in Georgia in 2020.

A spokesperson for Cobb County did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The state high court ordered that ballots received after Election Day be separated from other ballots and set aside. Voters who did not receive an absentee ballot or did not have enough time to mail it can vote in person on Tuesday.

Georgia is one of seven closely contested states expected to decide the outcome of the race between Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

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Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Scott Malone and Will Dunham

Updated 5:13 AM GMT+6, November 5, 2024

ATLANTA (AP) — Thousands of voters in Georgia’s third-largest county who received their absentee ballots late will not get an extension to return them, the state’s highest court decided on Monday.

Cobb County, just north of Atlanta, didn’t mail out absentee ballots to some 3,400 voters who had requested them until late last week. Georgia law says absentee ballots must be received by the close of polls on Election Day. But a judge in a lower court ruled last week that the ballots at issue could be counted if they’re received by this Friday, three days after Election Day, as long as they were postmarked by Tuesday.

The Georgia Supreme Court ruling means the affected Cobb County residents must vote in person on Election Day, which is Tuesday, or bring their absentee ballots to the county elections office by 7 p.m. that day.

The high court ruling instructs county election officials to notify the affected voters by email, text message and in a public message on the county election board’s website. And it orders officials to keep separate and sealed any ballots received after the Election Day deadline but before 5 p.m. Friday.

Board of elections Chair Tori Silas said the board will comply with the Supreme Court order, but it’s still up in the air whether ballots received after Election Day will be counted. The order only addressed a motion for a stay, so election officials will have to wait for the court’s final ruling to see whether votes received after Tuesday will be counted, she said in a statement.

To deliver the ballots on time, election officials in Cobb County were using U.S. Postal Service express mail and UPS overnight delivery, and sending the ballots with prepaid express return envelopes. The Board of Elections said that more than 1,000 of the absentee ballots being mailed late were being sent to people outside of Georgia.

Silas last week blamed the delay in sending out the ballots on faulty equipment and a late surge in absentee ballot requests during the week before the Oct. 25 deadline.

The original ruling extending the deadline stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of three Cobb County voters who said they had not received absentee ballots by mail as of Friday.

17 hours agoShareSave

Max Matza

BBC News

1:12’Only choice I got’ – Early voting starts in swing state Georgia

A judge in the US state of Georgia has blocked seven new state election rules favoured by Republican Donald Trump after finding that they would unnecessarily interfere with the voting process.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox on Wednesday struck down a rule that requires that ballots be counted by hand, and two others that had to do with the certification of election results.

“The rules at issue exceed or are in conflict with specific provisions of the Election Code. Thus, the challenged rules are unlawful and void,” Judge Cox wrote in his ruling.

Early voting began in Georgia on Tuesday, with record numbers casting their votes in the key swing state ahead of election day on 5 November.

More than 459,000 people voted in person or by post on the first day of voting, officials said – more than triple the previous record of 136,000 in 2020.

Around five million votes for president were cast in Georgia that year, with Democrat Joe Biden winning the state by just under 12,000.

Trump refused to accept the result. He is currently fighting criminal charges that he unlawfully tried to change the outcome.

A phone call recording has him telling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes”.

A judge overseeing the Georgia case later dismissed the charge related to that phone call, and five other charges.

The Georgia prosecutor pursuing the case against Trump, Fani Willis, on Tuesday asked an appeals court to re-instate the six dismissed counts.

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The hand count rule dismissed on Wednesday would have required three poll workers in the state’s more than 6,500 precincts to break open sealed boxes of ballots already scanned by machines to count them and check there was a match.

Critics said the rule could slow down the reporting of election results while supporters argued it would add minutes rather than hours to the count.

The rules had been criticised by Democrats since they were passed in August by the Republican-controlled State Election Board.

In a speech that month, Trump praised the Republican board members, calling them “pit bulls fighting for transparency, honesty and victory”.

In his ruling, Judge Cox also criticised a rule requiring county officials to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying results, saying that it “adds an additional and undefined step into the certification process”.

Another rule invalidated related to language allowing county election officials “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections.”

Supporters argued those rules would make sure vote totals were counted accurately before they were signed off. Critics said it could be used to delay or deny certification.

The hand count rule had been blocked in a ruling on Tuesday from a different judge, who found that “11th-and-one-half-hour implementation of the hand count rule” would diminish public confidence in the outcome and lead to “administrative chaos”.

“This election season is fraught; memories of January 6 [the 2021 US Capitol riot] have not faded away, regardless of one’s view of that date’s fame or infamy,” wrote Judge Robert McBurney.

“Anything that adds uncertainty and disorder to the electoral process disserves the public.”

Harris’ campaign welcomed the hand count ruling on Tuesday, calling it an attempt to sow doubt in the voting process.

In a separate decision on Monday, Judge McBurney ruled that election board members must certify vote results, after a Republican appointee to the board refused to certify the results of Georgia’s presidential primary earlier this year.

Georgia, nicknamed the Peach State, is one of seven key swing states expected to decide the contest between Trump and Harris.