The judge said the certificate of result would have to be withheld when millions of people voted in the state election. “He will interfere in the election after the vote.”
The judge also cited the tense atmosphere surrounding the election as a reason to be wary of interfering in the process at Wood’s request.
“In many ways, especially in the environment in which this election has taken place, it harms the public interest,” Grimberg said. “There is confusion from the 11th hour on to literally withhold the certificate and potentially get rid of what I think has no basis in fact or in law.”
Most of Wood’s claims complain about a consent decree reached in March, which requires officials to try to contact a voter before disqualifying a mail-in ballot because of a signature that does not match the file.
However, Rush Willard, a lawyer for Georgia Attorney General’s Office Fees, said there was no legal reason to go to Wood Court eight months later to object to the widely publicized deal.
“The plaintiff tried to change the rules at the end of the game to change the score,” Willard said.
Grimberg also agreed on that account, saying that unreasonable delays were cut against Wood’s ban order. But the judge’s ruling sparked a wave of hope for Trump supporters. He said he would have looked at the claim differently if he had been brought in by the Trump campaign or by the Republican Party.
Neither the Republican Party, nor the Trump campaign, nor any other candidate has joined the lawsuit, the judge said. “It certainly would have changed in the analysis when it came to settling.”
Wood vowed to appeal quickly, but Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, also hinted that the campaign could file its own federal lawsuit in Zurnai as early as Friday.
Some of the claims put forward by Wood during Thursday’s hearing as evidence of fraud or malpractice appear to have been dismissed under close scrutiny.
Wood’s attorney, Ray Smith, said the percentage of mail-in votes rejected by election officials in recent elections has dropped sharply, indicating that authorities are now ignoring fraud and mistakes that would have been caught in the past.
But Willard said the change reflects the fact that after the 2018 elections, the Georgia Legislature removed some of the requirements for absentee ballots, including the rule that such voters write their date of birth on a return envelope. Many were reluctant to do it for privacy reasons, so they kept it empty, he said. This year, there was no such requirement, so those denials were not an issue.
Trump closed the gap with Biden by nearly 2,000 votes following an audit of election results completed by officials on Thursday, but he is still out of the strike range.
Pittsburgh won a modest victory in the Trump campaign Thursday evening, as the state’s appeals court panel ruled 2-1 in favor of the Republican candidate’s bid to disqualify 2,349 mail-in ballots in the Pittsburgh area, with a lack of a next date. Voter’s signature
That ruling could be appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. If approved, it could reduce Biden’s vote count, but it doesn’t look like Trump will reach the nearly 1,000,000-vote lead that Biden has in the state.
