ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Top election officials in major swing states say they are prepared to take local governments to court if they refuse to certify the 2024 presidential election, a move that could impede an effort to overturn the election if former President Donald Trump loses.
Officials from Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin made the comments in interviews with USA TODAY and at a public event at the University of Michigan on Thursday, as they sought to assure the public that they would protect the legitimacy of the election.
“We would immediately take them to court to compel them to certify, and we’re confident — because of how clear the election law is in Pennsylvania — that the courts would expeditiously require the counties to certify their election results,” said Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt.
In battleground states and states where Vice President Kamala Harris is depending on victories to secure an Electoral College majority, county officials have voted against or delayed certifying the results of elections at least three dozen times since 2020 — from the presidential race down to school board recounts.
It’s an outgrowth of Trump and his allies’ strategy to overturn the 2020 election by stopping Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s victory. Local officials who refuse to certify a county’s results in 2024 may intend to stop Harris’ electoral votes from their state from being sent to Congress in the first place.
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While past local votes against certification have yet to overturn the results of an election, they have nonetheless left experts and observers wondering what will happen if rogue county officials are successful when certification of the presidential election begins Nov. 6. But key election officials say they’re prepared.
‘The state would sue’
Schmidt, a Republican who stood against efforts to overturn the 2020 election when he was a local government official in Philadelphia, pointed to three counties the state took to court during the 2022 primary to force them to certify the election results.
“Because we have dealt with that before, we will be prepared should it occur again,” he said.
Lisa Marra, Arizona’s elections director, a nonpartisan official who works for Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, said Arizona would take the same approach.
“The state would sue to get them to canvass the election,” Marra said of a county that refuses to certify. “If they refuse to canvass at that point, we’d go back to court, and the state could actually move forward without those results.”
Meagan Wolfe, the nonpartisan administrator for the Wisconsin Election Commission, declined to disclose the exact legal process that would be used to enforce certification of an election, but said she and others have been thinking about who has the power to do what.
“I feel very confident that if we were to have that kind of issue where we had to have a court intervene to mandate somebody to do their mandatory responsibilities, we’d be able to resolve that very quickly,” she said.
Nevada’s attorney general and secretary of state, both Democrats, took a county to court earlier this year when it refused to certify a local election. At the time, Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford said he would “never hesitate to join the secretary of state in protecting Nevada’s elections.”
Other remedies?
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, told USA TODAY it may not be necessary to engage with a county that didn’t certify, but added, “At the end of the day, we will make sure that every county follows the law and follows the Constitution.”
In Michigan, the state can step in and certify an election if a county board of canvassers does not, said Jonathan Brater, the director of elections. He said a vote against certifying wouldn’t stop the election from eventually being certified but would be “wasting a lot of time and money when the state has to do it all over again.”
Karen Brinson Bell, the nonpartisan executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, pointed to the oath that members of county boards of elections take that requires them to certify an election unless there’s cause to believe there was misconduct.
“So there has to be actual evidence, actual grounds,” she told USA TODAY.
The North Carolina State Board of Elections in 2023 removed two members from the Surry County Board of Elections for refusing to certify an election in protest over state election guidance. “That’s not a reason to overturn an election, or to not certify an election,” Brinson Bell said. “And so there was a complaint filed. The State Board heard that. And both members were removed.”
