Politics
Fulton County Board to Certify Midterm Results Monday Afternoon
The Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections meets at 3 p.m. Monday to certify the midterm results, a routine step that has become a political flashpoint in Georgia since 2020. The vote follows a Democratic sweep that made Keisha Lance Bottoms the first Black woman elected governor in U.S. history.
ATLANTA â The Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections is scheduled to meet at 3 p.m. Monday to certify the results of last week's midterm elections, formalizing the county's tallies after a statewide Democratic wave.
The certification is a legally required step in Georgia, but in Fulton County it has carried outsized political weight since 2020, when former President Donald Trump and his allies targeted the county's ballots with debunked claims of irregularities.
That history was on display in a January 2021 phone call in which Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find 11,780 votes," citing now-discredited allegations about Fulton County's handling of ballots. Trump lost Georgia to Joe Biden by about 11,800 votes.
The certification process itself became the subject of litigation in 2024, when Fulton County elections board member Julie Adams sued, arguing she should be allowed to withhold certification if she believed results were inaccurate or unreliable. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney rejected that argument, ruling that certification is a mandatory duty for election superintendents, not a discretionary act.
More recently, in January, FBI agents raided the Fulton County elections hub as part of a criminal investigation into potential federal election law violations tied to the 2020 presidential election. County officials at the time characterized the raid as political retribution.
Monday's vote follows a midterm election in which Democrats won key statewide offices in Georgia, including the governor's race. Governor-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms, a former Atlanta mayor, is set to become the first Black woman governor in American history. Democrats also secured a majority in the Georgia House of Representatives for the first time since 2004, while Republicans retained a slim majority in the Senate.
Certification by county boards is the step that locks in those results before they are transmitted to the state. The Fulton County board's meeting is open to the public and is scheduled to begin at 3 p.m.
For Fulton County voters, Monday's proceeding is the final local check on a election that drew intense national scrutiny â and a reminder that the once-routine administrative task is now a test of whether election officials will follow the law amid pressure to do otherwise.