A federal judge has issued a 56-page ruling ordering Georgia to protect provisional ballots Monday night.
According to the ruling signed by Judge Amy Totenberg, the state is prohibited from certifying the election results before 5:00 p.m. on Friday, November 16th.
The state must also take a number of steps to protect voters who cast provisional ballots due to registration problems. The ruling demands that the Secretary of State's office establish a hotline or website that will allow provisional ballot voters to find out whether or not their provisional ballots were counted -- if their vote wasn't counted they should also be provided with a reason why. The hotline or website must be made public on the Secretary of State's website as well as on the election websites of all 159 counties.
The ruling is in response to a lawsuit filed on November 5th by advocacy group Common Cause of Georgia. The lawsuit was filed against Brian Kemp, stating that as secretary of state, he 'failed to maintain the security of voter information despite known vulnerabilities leading up to the 2018 election.' The lawsuit went on to allege that the voter registration database increased the risk of eligible voters being 'unlawfully' removed from the state's database.