The Trump campaign was dealt a controversial legal defeat Thursday alongside Republican allies in Georgia, as the state judiciary moved to vacate a party lawsuit regarding absentee ballots.
According to local Fox News affiliate WAGA-TV, Chatham County Superior Court Judge James Bass ruled without explanation that the judiciary would not intervene to ensure late-arriving 2020 presidential election ballots were counted and stored separately from the remaining votes cast, in accordance with state law.
The coastal county, which encompasses Democratic-controlled Savannah, became the subject of potential election fraud allegations in the wake of election night when official poll observers reported seeing at least 53 late-arriving absentee ballots shuffled into a batch of unquestioned ballots to be counted.
County officials contradicted the claim in a just one-hour hearing Thursday, testifying that the ballots had arrived on time and were part of the original batch.
