Ruling beats back a lawsuit by a Republican election board member linked to an election denialist organization
Election certification is a mandatory duty, not discretionary, for county election officials in Georgia, a judge ruled on Tuesday, rejecting assertions made by a Republican elections official that elections board members could refuse to certify an election based on their suspicions of fraud or error.
Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton county board of registration and elections, brought the suit earlier this year after abstaining from a vote to certify the May primary election. The America First Policy Institute, a legal thinktank that was formed by former Donald Trump advisers in the wake of Trump’s 2020 election loss to help lay legal groundwork for his potential return to office, joined the suit.
Adams refused certification after claiming she had been denied access to a long list of elections documents. But Robert McBurney, Fulton county superior court judge, ruled that Adams was entitled to review documents quickly, but failing to provide those documents was not grounds for denying the certification of an election.
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McBurney is now my new favorite civil servant.
““To users of common parlance, ‘shall’ connotes instruction or command: You shall not pass!” he wrote.”
McBurney to Republicans:
“Shall” and “may” are used a lot, especially in gun law.
For instance there are counties that have concealed carry permits written as “may issue…” and the sherif decides if a ccp will get issued, but others are written as “shall issue…” and the sheriff is forced to issue the ccp unless they can defend a valid reason against doing so.
What I’m getting at is the “may vs shall” argument has a lot of previous legal definitions.
That’s why Gandalf didn’t say “may not” to the Balrog.
And ‘You cannot pass!’ in the book.
There were books? Neat.
@AmidFuror @MicroWave @jordanlund @Brkdncr yeah after the movies did so well they made books out of em
Yeah I heard JK Rowling helped author them.
This is how all my work documentation is. There are “shoulds” and “shalls” in our processes. If you don’t do a “should,” you just need to have a good reason why not. If you don’t do a “shall,” you need a blessing from the person who owns the process, and someone else needs to agree that they accept all risk associated with not doing it, and they literally have to put their name next to it. It’s a big deal, as it should be, because most of those “shalls” are there for safety