A Trump-appointed federal judge on Tuesday harshly rejected an eleventh-hour bid from the Republican National Committee and the Georgia Republican Party that sought to force seven historically Democratic counties in the swing state to stop accepting absentee ballots returned this weekend.
In a telephone hearing on Tuesday, Judge R. Stan Baker of the US District Court for the Southern District of Georgia called the arguments underlying the lawsuit “red herrings” that amounted to efforts designed to “tip the scales of this election by discriminating against [counties] less likely to vote for their candidate.”
The lawsuit, filed Sunday, alleged that seven Georgia counties were violating state law—as well as the 14th Amendment and Elections Clause of the Constitution—by allowing voters to hand-deliver absentee ballots throughout the weekend and, in some cases, into Monday. The lawsuit cited a part of state law claiming that ballots needed to be returned the Friday before the election—but it turns out that’s the deadline for early voting, not for absentee ballots. As the Democratic National Committee and the state Democratic party responded in their court filing, the same state election law the GOP cited also says absentee ballots can be returned in person, which the Georgia Secretary of State also confirmed this weekend. And the state election website says absentee ballots are accepted through Election Day.
But Republicans alleged that county election boards were harming their “strategies and turnout efforts” by forcing them “to quickly mobilize staff and volunteers to ensure a poll watcher presence at election offices across the Defendants’ counties.” (As I have written, the GOP recruited a 200,000 person-strong pro-Trump army of “poll watchers” to “establish the battlefield” to challenge the results of the election, should former president Donald Trump lose.) In other words, through their lawsuit, the GOP seems to be seeking to do what their party has long sought to do: Limit eligible voters, especially those who favor Democrats.
But Baker was not having it: The judge—who Trump nominated in 2017 and who was confirmed the following year—said in the Tuesday phone hearing that the RNC lawsuit lacked “a basic level of statutory review and reading comprehension,” according to POLITICO. (The transcript of the hearing was not yet immediately publicly available.) At one point, Baker even reportedly urged GOP lawyers to read The Boy Who Cried Wolf, adding, “Please don’t take us any closer to that ledge.” Spokespeople for the RNC and the Georgia GOP did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
This is almost certainly not the last you’ll hear of GOP-led legal challenges in this election. It’s just one of the dozens of pre-election lawsuits the Republican National Committee has filed across the country in a bid to retake the White House through the courts, as my colleague Pema Levy recently reported.
