A federal judge on Monday ruled in favor of Stacey Abrams’ campaign, ruling that Georgia must count provisional ballots and delay the state’s certification until the votes are tallied, her campaign said on Twitter.
Lauren Groh-Wargo, Abrams campaign manager, announced Judge Amy Totenberg’s decision late Monday. WSBTV.com reported that the judge’s 56-page ruling could affect thousands of provisional ballots.
Brian Kemp, her Republican challenger, issued a statement a day earlier calling for Abrams to concede. Kemp has declared victory and said it is “mathematically impossible” for her campaign to force a runoff.
Good news tonight 1) Federal judge rules the state must count provisionals and delays state certification until the end of the week thanks to @CommonCauseGA suit 2) More votes came in for @staceyabrams, gap continues to narrow 3) We’ll be in court tomorrow #CountEveryVote #gapol
— Lauren Groh-Wargo (@gwlauren) November 13, 2018
Abrams’ campaign did not immediately respond to a phone call from Fox News late Monday night.
Abrams, 44, a Democrat, has maintained that she will not concede until every vote has been counted, and pointed to the 5,000 votes tallied over the weekend that favored her.
Dara Lindenbaum, a lawyer for Abrams’ campaign, said the suit intends to stop ballots with minor mistakes — like the voter writing the day they filled out the ballot as their date of birth — from being rejected.
But Kemp aides previously said Abrams has no path to victory and called her refusal to concede a “disgrace to democracy.”
The lawsuit claimed that Kemp, while secretary of state, failed to maintain “the security of voter information despite known vulnerabilities” leading up to the midterm. The suit blasted the state’s “provisional ballot scheme,” that could disenfranchise a registered voter at the ballot box.
The suit pointed out cases where voters were turned around after computer glitches and cases where voters were not not offered provisional ballots. One man voted for decades and was “disturbed” to learn his registration history was erased.
The court ruled that the secretary of state’s office must establish a hotline and publicize it on its website for voters to see if their provisional ballots were counted. The court also pushed back the state’s certifying results until Friday at 5 p.m.
A total of 21,190 provisional ballots were cast in the state during the midterm, which easily doubled the 12,151 cast in 2014. Four Democratic-leaning counties with the largest number of provisional ballots — Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton, and Gwinnett – “had not yet reported their numbers to the secretary as of November 11,” the suit said.
Edgardo Cortes, who currently works as an election security adviser at New York University, said these uncounted provisional ballots could sway the election and, despite Kemp’s claims, his unofficial vote total is so close to 50 percent, a runoff is possible.
Kemp was up 50.2 percent to Abrams’ 48.7 percent early Tuesday. There were more than 3.9 million votes. Abrams would need to add more than 20,000 additional votes to force a runoff.
“This ruling is a victory for the voters of Georgia because we are all stronger when every eligible voter is allowed to participate in our elections,” Sara Henderson, executive director for Common Cause Georgia, which filed the lawsuit, told AJC.com.
