Georgia judge rejects Republican lawsuit seeking to block acceptance of hand-returned mail ballots in Fulton County
CBSN
A Georgia judge on Saturday rejected a Republican lawsuit trying to block counties from opening election offices on Saturday and Sunday to let voters hand in their mail ballots in person.
The lawsuit only named Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold that includes most of the city of Atlanta and is home to 11% of the state's voters. But at least five other populous counties that tend to vote for Democrats also announced election offices would open over the weekend to allow hand return of absentee ballots.
The lawsuit was filed late Friday and cited a section of Georgia law that says ballot drop boxes cannot be open past the end of advance voting, which ended Friday. But state law says voters can deliver their absentee ballots in person to county election offices until the close of polls at 7 p.m. on Election Day. Despite that clear wording, lawyer Alex Kaufman initially claimed in an emergency hearing Saturday that voters aren't allowed to hand-deliver absentee ballots that were mailed to them.
Five presidents in U.S. history have won the presidency without winning the popular vote, and the most recent to do so was Donald Trump in 2016. His opponent that year, Hillary Clinton, won over 2.8 million more votes than Trump nationwide, but she lost enough key states to be defeated in the Electoral College, 306 to 232.
We've all seen a lot of political ads lately. But in battleground states, it's a tsunami. Jack Levis is an independent voter in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which makes him one of the most desirable voters on the planet: "Emails, texts, phone calls, it's in my news feed, it's in social media. In the last two days, I counted, I had 30 spam emails in there all about the election," he said. "It's unbelievable."