In August 2024, the Georgia State Election Board passed a controversial rule requiring counties to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into vote totals before certifying election results. They “failed to define what constitutes a 'reasonable inquiry' and suggested [...] that such inquiries could justify failing to certify by that date (or any specific date).”
In addition, under Georgia’s SB202 law, the state election board has new powers to take over election administration in up to four counties it deems "underperforming," possibly stripping some county election boards of their power to certify elections and giving the state board discretion on whether to do so.
The deadline to certify county election results is November 13 at 5 pm (local time) according to the Secretary of State's website. Failing to certify results by that date could lead to legal challenges and political controversy.
Resolution Criteria:
This question will resolve to “YES” if any Georgia county fails to certify its 2024 general presidential election results by the state’s certification deadline, regardless of whether certification occurs later due to legal or administrative actions. Otherwise, it will resolve "NO".
The resolution will be based on credible news reports.
1,000
3.00The AJC reports that
The [Fulton County] board certified election results shortly after missing its 5 p.m. deadline.
Since we have a credible news report that the certification was not complete until after the deadline (in addition to the video provided by @Fay42), this resolves YES. It is definitely not what I expected after the election results, but the condition for YES has clearly been met.
@Throwaway100 The article is under a paywall (I have a subscription) but you can confirm what it says by going to this archived page and copying and pasting the highlighted text. It's blurred, but if you copy and paste you can see what it says.
Resolves Yes as Fulton county didn't certify till past 5: https://www.youtube.com/live/b3GXghZ8zdc?t=26335&feature=shared
The date for certification was today at 5pm (see that video but also the doc linked in the description and this npr article as a more mainstream example.)
@Ziddletwix I think that tweet is correct but it's 1 hour and 4 minutes past the deadline. And if I'm not mistaken Fulton county missed the deadline.
@Fay42 it's possible i misunderstood what i saw! in any case, the resolution criteria is pretty clear:
The resolution will be based on credible news reports.
so we'll see in a bit what credible news reports say (i.e. whether they missed the deadline or not).
there's been lots of news coverage of the certification process so if the deadline was missed there will be lots of news report covering that!
@Ziddletwix So the youtube video is, I guess, not ]unambiguously] credible media report, in that it's a primary source (from the Fulton Government Television youtube channel). But it does have the fulton county board saying that they are certifying past 5pm today. Not very long past - judging by the upload time and video length it was something like 6pm - but still, technically past the deadline.
@Fay42 In the absence of any other evidence, it might make sense to rely on the YT video, since that's all we have. Given that this case has been extensively covered by the media (as you linked to, many reputable sources wrote stories today highlighting the importance of the deadline), & the fact that the resolution criteria were quite specific about using "consensus of credible reporting", it seems obvious that we'd go based on what reporting says.
not to get bogged down into the details prematurely (since i expect this will be settled just fine by the media reports saying "yup certification went exactly as planned" or "fulton missed the deadline"), but one reason to rely on the reporting is that i don't pretend to be an expert on how the legal deadline is defined. in plenty of cases, if you are in the process of completing something at the deadline that still counts as satisfying the deadline. i won't pretend to be a lawyer here, but i would trust all the media reporting on this closely scrutinized issue over whether someone frets that they're running late in a YT video
Fwiw the person who frets there running late is the chair of their elections board iiuc. Also I'm a bit worried that "they got it certified on the day they said they would" and "they got it certified precisely before they said they would" will get conflated by media but I guess I'm happy to wait for media coverage to exist before debating it's validity - hopefully this won't be an issue.
@Ziddletwix I found a credible news report confirming the narrow miss: https://www.ajc.com/politics/georgia-election-boards-certify-trumps-win-as-republicans-object-to-law/JWW6B7LTWNG4THDRDUAQ73UW4Y/
The [Fulton County] board certified election results shortly after missing its 5 p.m. deadline.