Advocacy group files lawsuit to void Congressional election results News
Advocacy group files lawsuit to void Congressional election results

A Colorado-based watchdog group, the Coalition for Good Governance, and six Georgia voters filed a lawsuit [complaint, PDF] on Monday to throw out the most recent election results for the Georgia House of Representatives. The June 20 election was a race between Republican Karen Handel and Democrat Jon Ossoff [campaign websites]. Handel won with 52 percent of the votes. Voters used electronic, touchscreen voting ballots, as opposed to paper ballots. The lawsuit calls out major security problems with the voting system, as well as problems concerning verifiability. The named defendants in the lawsuit were Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, members of the State Election Board, local election officials in Fulton, Cobb and DeKalb counties, and the Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University.

Voting rights, on both the national and state level, have been an issue in the US for decades and voting issues have gone to court in many states in just the past year. This lawsuit comes after Superior Court Judge Kimberly Esmond Adams threw out a lawsuit earlier this month that sought to prevent the election from using electronic ballots. In May the US Supreme Court granted certiorari in an Ohio voting case. Also in May, the Maine Supreme Court ruled [JURIST report] that the state’s newly enacted legislation providing for a ranked-choice voting system conflicted with the state’s constitution. In March seven convicted felons filed suit [JURIST report] alleging Florida’s process of restoring voting rights to felons is unconstitutionally arbitrary.