Georgia: Rudy Giuliani avoids trial by settling with election workers he defamed | Nicki Brown and Katelyn Polantz/CNN

Rudy Giuliani has reached an agreement with two Georgia election workers that he defamed to settle the nearly $150 million judgment against him, in a deal that will allow him to keep his home and most valuable possessions. The settlement agreement brings to an end a yearslong saga over Giuliani’s false statements after the 2020 presidential election, when the former New York City mayor was a lawyer for then-President Donald Trump. Giuliani was about to face trial and potentially lose the Florida condo in which he says he lives and several New York Yankees World Series rings. He had been in litigation with the women, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, over whether his $3.5 million Florida condo is his primary residence and can be exempt from the women’s debt collection efforts. Read Article

Georgia lawmakers consider even more election changes after a smooth 2024 election | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Every year, Georgia Republicans pass new “election integrity” laws they say are needed to boost voters’ confidence since the close 2020 election. Now that Donald Trump won a clear victory, the GOP base is emboldened by his return to power and is pushing for even more changes to Georgia’s voting laws — this time, without the false claim that the election was stolen. From hand ballot counts to an elimination of no-excuse absentee voting, the Georgia General Assembly could consider a wide variety of election proposals during the 2025 legislative session. Conservative activists are also seeking to require paper ballots filled out by hand instead of touchscreens, stronger authority to challenge voters’ eligibility and new rules to certify election results. Read Article

Georgia appeals court strips DA Fani Willis of case that charged Donald Trump with election interference | Tamar Hallerman and Bill Rankin/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Georgia Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her office should be disqualified from the 2020 election interference case, a bombshell decision that upends the last remaining criminal case against incoming President Donald Trump. In a 2-1 opinion, the court concluded that Willis’ onetime romantic relationship with former special prosecutor Nathan Wade merited her dismissal from the case. “After carefully considering the trial court’s findings in its order, we conclude that it erred by failing to disqualify DA Willis and her office,” Judge Trenton Brown wrote for the majority. He was joined by Judge Todd Markle. A third judge, Benjamin Land, issued a strongly worded dissent. Read Article

Georgia laws impacting homeless voters, creating election boards to take effect in 2025 | Maya Homan/Savannah Morning News

As the 2024 election season comes to a close, state lawmakers across Georgia are turning their attention to the start of a new biennium, which will begin during the 2025 legislative session on Jan. 13. The upcoming session may include continued focus on elections, as the State Election Board seeks clarity from the legislature on proposed rule changes introduced ahead of the Nov. 5 general election. Election bills passed in 2024 alone have already changed the way ballots cast across the state are collected, tallied and audited. Some election bills that were passed during the most recent legislative session, including HB 974 and HB 1207, have already gone into effect, but others are set to begin in the new year. Read Article

Georgia: Trump’s lawyers move to dismiss election interference case | Dareh Gregorian and Charlie Gile/NBC

Attorneys for President-elect Donald Trump asked a Georgia appeals court Wednesday to dismiss the Fulton County racketeering case against him because a “sitting president is completely immune from indictment or any criminal process, state or federal.” In papers filed with the Georgia Court of Appeals, Trump’s attorneys argued the 2020 election interference charges should be tossed because of “the unconstitutionality of his continued indictment and prosecution by the State of Georgia” now that “he is President-Elect and will soon become the 47th President of the United States.” The case has been stalled for most of the year as Trump’s lawyers have challenged a ruling that denied their request to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her office from prosecuting the case on conflict-of-interest grounds. Read Article

Georgia: Hand-count election audit verifies Trump’s victory | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A hand-count audit of Georgia’s presidential election reported miniscule discrepancies from the machine count, confirming President-elect Donald Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris. The results of the manual review released Wednesday showed 11 more votes for Trump and six fewer for Harris out of nearly 750,000 ballots reviewed by election officials across the state. “This audit shows that our system works and that our county election officials conducted a secure, accurate election,” said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, “they are the cream of the crop.” Read Article

Georgia: Dice roll kicks off randomized ballot audit of presidential election | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A roll of the dice Thursday at the Georgia State Capitol started a statewide audit of the presidential election, a human review of paper ballots to check results counted by computers. One by one, election workers and volunteers tossed 10-sided dice onto a table to create a random 20-digit number. That random number was then fed into a computer to pick sample ballots to be reviewed in each of Georgia’s 159 counties over the next few days. The hand-reviewed count will be compared with the machine count to verify the outcome was correct. Read Article

Georgia: Fulton County has smooth election night after previous troubles | Katherine Landergan/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Fulton County’s election operations were under the microscope this year after a heavily scrutinized performance in 2020, and by all measures, the county passed the test. Robb Pitts, chair of Fulton’s Board of Commissioners, gave his county a grade of “A,” and he said “the results of today’s election prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Fulton County was ready for the 2024 election.” County officials weathered dozens of false bomb threats on Election Day, but they avoided any major controversies that haunted them in 2020. The Democratic bastion came under fire that election cycle, when then-President Donald Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, made untrue allegations that Fulton election workers were counting fraudulent ballots. Read Article

Georgia’s investigations into the election breach in Coffee County have stalled | Katherine Landergan/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Nearly four years ago, security cameras captured the moment that allies of former President Donald Trump walked into a South Georgia office where authorities say they copied confidential software and files that could be used to undermine the legitimacy of an election. Today, as Georgia approaches the eve of another presidential election, the fate of the Coffee County breach is still frozen in a state of limbo. So far, the only criminal charges in connection with the activities in the rural Georgia community have been filed in Fulton County, some 200 miles away. But that case, which also involves other allegations of election interference, has stalled. And although the state Attorney General’s office received a nearly 400-page report from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation more than a year ago, they have pressed pause. Election integrity advocates warned that the inaction sends a dangerous message to other bad actors who may want to tamper with Georgia’s voting system and undercut democracy. Read Article

Georgia’s secretary of state’s office stops election website cyber attack | Caleb Groves/The Atlanta Journal Constitution

The Georgia secretary of state’s office stopped a cyberattack this month targeted at the state’s absentee voting website. A state cyberdefense team, along with the cybersecurity firm Cloudflare, prevented what is believed to be foreign hackers from shutting off the secretary of state’s absentee ballot website on the afternoon of Oct. 14, before the start of early voting. “We were able to put in an interface that says ‘I am a human,’ which immediately mitigated the issue and only slowed it down and didn’t crash the site at all,” said Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the secretary of state’s office. “Our tools did everything right. This was a win.” At the peak of the incident over 420,000 different IP addresses were attempting to attack the absentee site at the same time, Sterling said. He said the state’s election process was not interrupted by the attack. Read Article

How One Georgia Voter’s Mistake Turned Into a Voter Fraud Conspiracy Theory | Stuart A. Thompson/The New York Times

All it took was one mistake by a voter in Georgia to propel a conspiracy theory to nationwide attention and the upper echelons of Republican politics. Election officials in the state said that the voter, a woman whose name they did not disclose, visited a polling site in Whitfield County last week and used a touch-screen voting machine to cast her ballot. She mistakenly selected one candidate’s name when she had intended to choose another. The episode was over almost as soon as it began: The voter tried again, fixed the mistake and successfully cast her ballot. But online, the story quickly took on a life of its own, catapulted to prominence by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, and transforming into an elaborate conspiracy theory involving voting machines that were somehow “flipping” votes between candidates en masse. Read Article

Georgia judge blocks rule requiring counties to hand-count Election Day ballots | Adam Edelman/NBC

A Georgia judge on Tuesday blocked a new rule from the state’s election board that would have required counties to count ballots cast on Election Day by hand, a provision critics had said would cause delays and disruptions in reporting results in the battleground state. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in his decision that the rule would be implemented too close to the election and that it would cause “administrative chaos” given the limited time available to train poll workers. “[T]he public interest is not disserved by pressing pause here. This election season is fraught; memories of January 6 have not faded away, regardless of one’s view of that date’s fame or infamy,” he wrote. Read Article

Georgia: County election board members must certify election results, a judge rules | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Certifying elections is a required duty of county election boards in Georgia, and they’re not allowed to refuse to finalize results based on suspicions of miscounts or fraud, a Fulton County judge ruled Tuesday. Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney rejected claims brought by Fulton County election board member Julie Adams, who voted against certifying this spring’s presidential primary. McBurney ruled that Georgia law requires certification and county election boards don’t have any discretion not to do so. “If election superintendents were, as plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so — because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud — refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced,” McBurney wrote. “Our Constitution and our election code do not allow for that to happen.” Read Article

Georgia: Republican-led group sues to block rule requiring hand count of ballots | Jeff Amy and Kate Brumback/Associated Press

A Republican-led group is challenging Georgia’s new requirement that poll workers count the total number of ballots by hand, saying it’s another example of the State Election Board overstepping its legal authority. Eternal Vigilance Action amended its existing lawsuit on Wednesday to also challenge that rule adopted Friday by the board. The group, founded and led by former state Rep. Scot Turner, a Republican, was already suing the board over rules that it earlier adopted on certifying votes, a step that finalizes results. One of those rules provides for an undefined “reasonable inquiry” before county election officials certify while another allows county election officials “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections.” Read Article

Georgia: Judge dismisses Republican lawsuit alleging voting machine vulnerabilities | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A judge threw out a DeKalb County Republican Party lawsuit Friday that claimed Georgia’s voting system was made vulnerable by the public disclosure of security features and computer code. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee dismissed the case because Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger complied with state law when he certified the Dominion voting system as “safe and practicable” before it went into use in 2020. “Although applicant may firmly believe that the secretary’s current processes are ‘nonsensical’ and ‘appalling,’ and good-faith concerns over how to better secure our elections should be taken seriously, this matter is currently one that must be deferred to the policymaking branches,” McAfee wrote in the dismissal. Read Article

Georgia Republicans sow doubt about Dominion voting machines in 2020 throwback | Zachary Cohen/CNN

Just weeks before early voting begins in Georgia, Republican Party officials and Donald Trump allies are trying to preemptively sow doubt about the viability of Dominion systems used across the key swing state, arguing in court that the machines should not be used because they are not safe or secure. In a replay of 2020 tactics, Republicans have continued to claim without proof that Dominion voting systems were exploited in previous elections, resulting in mass manipulation and vote-flipping by a nefarious actor. And GOP officials in DeKalb County in Georgia, aided by a familiar cast of pro-Trump lawyers, have signaled they are planning to once again question the 2024 election results if Trump loses. Read Article

Georgia election boards must certify the state’s election results despite new rules, judge says | Mark Niesse and David Wickert/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In two preelection trials Tuesday, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney said state law requires county election boards to certify results one week after Election Day. Republicans who raised the question agreed that certification is mandatory — but with an important caveat. They said individual board members had the right to vote “no” and a majority of members could decide to exclude precincts from certification if they suspected fraud or irregularities. McBurney didn’t immediately issue rulings after the Republican-controlled State Election Board recently approved a rule calling for an undefined “reasonable inquiry” before certification on Nov. 12. Read Article

Georgia: The election deniers with a chokehold on the state election board | Justin Glawe/The Guardian

A rule passed last week, which bipartisan election officials in Georgia say will delay the counting of votes in November, was introduced by an election denier who appears to believe in various rightwing conspiracies and whose apparent experience in elections dates only to February. The rule – which requires poll workers to hand-count ballots at polling locations – was passed by an election-denier majority on the Georgia state election board on Friday. It was introduced by Sharlene Alexander, a Donald Trump supporter and member of the Fayette county board of elections, who was appointed to her position in February. Alexander’s Facebook page alludes to a belief in election conspiracies. Alexander is oJustin Glawene of 12 people – all election deniers – who have introduced more than 30 rules to the state election board since May, according to meeting agendas and summaries reviewed by the Guardian. Of those, the board has approved several, including two that give county election officials more discretion to refuse to certify election results, in addition to Alexander’s hand-count rule. Read Article

Georgia: How the Election-Denial Mindset Works | Elaine Godfrey/The Atlantic

It’s normal, in September of an election year, for Anne Dover to feel stressed. This week, the 58-year-old elections director of Cherokee County, Georgia, has been drowning in absentee-ballot applications and wrangling new poll workers. What isn’t normal, though, is her looming sense of dread. What if this time, Dover sometimes wonders, things get even worse? Four years ago, when Donald Trump was seeding doubt about the election, Dover’s community outside of Atlanta came unhinged. People protested as she and her team met before certifying the county’s votes. They took photos of Dover’s car; they followed her home; they left threatening voicemails; someone even called in a bomb threat to her office. The protests didn’t make much sense—Trump had won Cherokee County by almost 40 points. But sense had nothing to do with it. “People just really were so unhappy about the results, and they thought they could bring about change by being vocal,” Dover, a Republican, told me. Read Article

In Georgia, a New Showdown Is Brewing Over Election Rules | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

A showdown is brewing between the top election official in Georgia and the State Election Board over more than a dozen new rules and procedures scheduled to be voted on by the board at a meeting on Friday. A lawyer for the election official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, sent a scathing letter to the State Election Board on Monday, criticizing “the absurdity of the board’s actions” while warning that new rules under consideration are dangerously late in the election process and most likely illegal. Read Article

Georgia: Judge narrows election interference case against Trump | Charlie Gile, Laura Jarrett and Ginger Gibson/NBC

The judge overseeing the election interference case against Donald Trump and several co-defendants in Georgia has thrown out three counts in the indictment — including two counts brought against the former president. The original 41-count indictment accused Trump and several of his allies of a broad scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia, but the case has been stalled for months as an effort to disqualify the top prosecutor remains on appeal. Read Article

Georgia Governor Faces New Pressure Over Far-Right Elections Board Takeover | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

Georgia has long been a battleground in the fight over the country’s democratic institutions. This year, it is shaping up to be just as critical. Earlier this year, a new majority of far-right Republicans gained control of Georgia’s State Election Board. The votes taken since have prompted deep concern that the board is rewriting the rules of the game in a key swing state to disrupt certification of elections and favor former President Donald Trump. Now, a bipartisan effort to pressure the governor to investigate the three-person majority is ramping up. Democrats, voting rights groups and some Republicans are pressing Gov. Brian Kemp to rein in what they see as a rogue board increasingly aligned with the far-right wing of the Republican Party. Read Article

Georgia board rejects widespread use of paper ballots for November election | David Wickert/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The State Election Board on Monday rejected calls to implement widespread use of paper ballots filled out by hand in the November election. Election integrity advocates asked the board to authorize the statewide use of hand-marked paper ballots, citing concerns about the security of Georgia’s Dominion Voting System machines. “I’m just asking you to move to secure our voting system before the most important election in my lifetime,” longtime tea party activist Debbie Dooley, who proposed one of the rules, told the board. But the board unanimously rejected two similar rules calling for the use of hand-marked paper ballots. Among other things, board members said they lack the authority to implement sweeping changes to the way Georgians cast their ballots. Read Article

Georgia Secretary of State blasts proposed rule requiring hand count of ballots at polling places | Kate Brumback/Associated Press

Georgia’s secretary of state on Thursday came out against election rule changes pending before the State Election Board, specifically rejecting a proposal to count ballots by hand at polling places on election night. At a meeting in July, the board advanced a proposal that would require three separate poll workers to count ballots at voting precincts on election night to make sure they match the number of ballots recorded by voting machines. That proposal has been posted for public comment and the board is set to vote Monday whether to adopt it. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top elections official, called that effort “misguided,” saying it would delay the reporting of election results and introduce risks to chain of custody procedures. Read Article

Georgia website flaw allowed users to cancel others’ voter registrations | Colin Wood/StateScoop

A cybersecurity researcher over the weekend uncovered a flaw in a Georgia website that allowed anyone with rudimentary technical knowledge — and a bit of ill will — to cancel others’ voter registrations. ProPublica and Atlanta News First reported on Monday they’d been contacted over the weekend by cybersecurity researcher Jason Parker, who said he found the flaw and reported it to state officials. The flaw, which Georgia state officials said has been fixed, involved using a web browser to inspect the HTML of a new webpage for voter registration cancellation that’s administered by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. In a video, Parker demonstrated how it was possible to cancel a voter’s registration using only a name, date of birth and county of residence. Read Article

Georgia Board Grants Local Officials New Power Over Certifying Elections | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

The Republican-controlled Georgia State Election Board approved on Tuesday a measure that could empower local officials to refuse or delay certification of a county’s election results, creating the potential for another disputed and contentious post-election period in November. The new rule states that before certifying results, local officials may conduct “reasonable inquiry” that “the results are a true and accurate accounting of all votes cast in that election.” Though seemingly innocuous, the language implies that local election officials are awarded a level of discretion in the certification process, a suggestion that runs counter to decades of settled Georgia law delineating how results are officially certified. State law dictates that officials “shall” certify an election, making the process effectively ministerial; disputes over alleged fraud or major errors are typically left to recounts and courts. Read Article

Georgia: Presidential election audit based on ballot images on hold amid company’s protest | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The idea was to triple-check this year’s presidential election results by uploading images of every ballot cast in Georgia, scanning them with text-recognition software and creating an independent vote count. Lawmakers budgeted $5 million for the concept that would verify the results generated by the state’s Dominion Voting Systems equipment, an extra step beyond an existing hand-count audit of a statistical sample of ballots. But the recount-by-software plan is now stalled because of a protest by a company that wasn’t chosen to receive the state’s contract. It’s unclear whether the dispute will be resolved in time for November’s election. Read Article

Georgia election proposal would add new rule before certification | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Local election board members across Georgia would be entitled to review vast troves of documents before they certify this fall’s presidential election under a rule proposal that critics fear would allow partisans to reject the results. The Republican-controlled State Election Board voted 3-1 on Tuesday to advance the proposal, which was sought by Cobb County Republican Party Chairwoman Salleigh Grubbs. The initiative follows, even when there weren’t any problems and the outcome of the election wasn’t in doubt. Certification is a required step under state law before election results can be finalized by counties the Monday after election day. If the majority of an election board refused to certify the presidential race, the results could be delayed and disputed in court. Read Article

Georgia: Racist slurs and death threats: The dangerous life of an elections official | Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline

When Milton Kidd leaves work at the end of the day, he slips out the back door of the domed Douglas County Courthouse, avoiding the public entrance where people might berate him or demand his home address. He never takes the same route home two days in a row, and he makes random turns to avoid being followed. Kidd, a Black man, has a very dangerous job: He is the elections and voter registration director for Douglas County. “Milton Kidd is a nasty n***** living on tax money like the scum he is,” one voter wrote in an email Kidd shared with Stateline. “Living on tax money, like a piece of low IQ n***** shit.” Another resident from Kidd’s county of 149,000 west of Atlanta left him a voicemail. “I don’t know if you’re aware, Milton, but the American people have set a precedent for what they do to f***ing tyrants and oppressors who occupy government office,” the caller said. “Yep, back in the 1700s, they were called the British and the f***ing American people got so fed up with the f***ing British being dicks, kind of like you, and then they just f***ing killed all the f***ing British.” Read Article

Georgia becomes first state to require election law training for police | George Chidi/The Guardian

Georgia is the first state to mandate training in election law in order for police to become state certified, a reflection of lessons learned in the aftermath of the state’s 2020 race. The new requirement for police trainees to take a one-hour course on election laws is meant to keep officers from trying to guess at how to enforce the law on election day, said Chris Harvey, deputy executive director for the Georgia peace officer standards and training council. “Cops just really need to know what are some of the basic ground rules around elections and voting, because they’re very specific,” he said. “In my opinion, the worst thing that can happen is if you have a partisan person or partisan force trying to manipulate the police, and have the police not have any idea what they’re supposed to be doing.” Read Article