Atlanta attorney backing Trump sues to stop Georgia election results

A prominent Atlanta attorney who supports President Trump filed a lawsuit Friday against Georgia’s secretary of state and election board in an effort to stop the certification of 2020 election results. 

Lin Wood, best known for his defense of Richard Jewell in the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics bomb threat case, announced on Twitter on Friday that he had filed a lawsuit against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) and election officials in which he argued that a March 2020 settlement with the Democratic Party was unconstitutional and therefore invalidated absentee ballots cast in the 2020 election. 

I filed a lawsuit today in federal court in Atlanta to establish that the March 6, 2020 Consent Agreement by the GA Secretary of State rendered UNLAWFUL the 11/3 GA general election.

I am right under established law. https://t.co/3FBMWlPDmC

— Lin Wood (@LLinWood) November 13, 2020

The lawsuit came the same day that multiple news outlets projected President-elect Joe Biden the winner of the race in Georgia, making him the first Democratic White House hopeful in nearly three decades to carry the state.

The Associated Press and other news outlets last week declared Biden to be the president-elect after the Democrat pulled ahead by a wide enough margin to take Pennsylvania. 

Wood cited in his lawsuit Friday a March settlement that outlined changes in how signature matching on absentee ballots is handled. 

Under the agreement, if the registrar or absentee ballot clerk determines that the voter’s signature on the ballot envelope does not match the signature on file, that reviewer must get two others to also review it. 

After that, a majority of the reviewers must agree that the signature is not a valid match in order for the ballot to be thrown out.

In Wood’s lawsuit, the attorney argues that this change was made “unilaterally” and “without the approval or direction of the Georgia General Assembly.” 

“Allowing a single party to write rules for reviewing signatures is not ‘conducive to the fair … conduct of primaries and elections’ or ‘consistent with law,'” the lawsuit reads.

Wood adds, “As a result, the inclusion and tabulation of absentee ballots for the general election (and potentially, for all future elections held within this state) is improper and must not be permitted.” 

Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs responded to Wood’s lawsuit Friday, calling the legal action a “silly baseless claim.”

“Signature match is intact and the General Assembly passed legislation to allow voters who failed to include a signature time to add one,” Fuchs said, according to 11Alive, NBC’s Atlanta affiliate station. “Fulton County only had one rejected ballot in 2018 and now they have thousands. We strengthened signature match, and will continue to do so, period.”

Wood’s lawsuit came the same day judges in both Pennsylvania and Michigan rejected GOP efforts to block the certification of election results. 

A Philadelphia court rejected five legal challenges by the Trump campaign and Republicans alleging irregularities in mail-in ballots. The separate petitions challenged more than 8,300 votes in Philadelphia, alleging voters did not print their names under their signatures or print their addresses on their mail-in ballots’ outer envelopes.

The court said the challenges did not stand, as the county’s Board of Elections does not require voters to print their names or fill out their addresses because the information is already pre-printed on the envelope.

A Michigan judge ruled that claims of widespread voter fraud in a lawsuit from Republican poll challengers were “incorrect and not credible.”