We now interrupt Buzz’s sound and thoughtful policy posts to bring you more GRA craziness

The Election Integrity Industrial Complex™ must be bored.

That is about the only charitable explanation for why the same small circle of professional ballot mystics and convention-floor nostalgists has now decided, despite my previous post on the topic, to recycle last year’s anti-Raffensperger resolution into a formal challenge to his place on the Republican primary ballot.

Yes, really.

After months of treating a convention resolution like it was handed down from Sinai instead of barked through a crowded hall on a voice vote, two – I assume – Georgia Republican Assembly members have now filed a challenge to Brad Raffensperger’s qualification as a Republican candidate for governor. Their theory, in essence, is that the 2025 Georgia Republican convention voted to block him, party officers had no authority to disregard that vote, and therefore, Raffensperger should be kicked off the ballot.

You can view the filed documents here. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

There is just one problem.

Actually, there are several. And they all begin with the same inconvenient fact: the resolution they are trying to weaponize still appears not to have been worth the paper it was printed on.

I wrote earlier about the procedural defects in that resolution. At the time, the question was whether convention delegates had passed something that was politically satisfying but parliamentary junk. The new ballot challenge does not clear that up. It practically confirms it.

In that earlier piece, I pointed out a fairly obvious problem under Robert’s Rules of Order. If the resolution was really meant to do more than express displeasure – if it was intended to function as a disciplinary act depriving Raffensperger of the right to seek the Republican nomination – then it likely required more than an ordinary majority. Actions restricting a member’s rights generally require either proper disciplinary procedures or a two-thirds vote. Yet the convention adopted the measure by voice vote, which meant no one could say with confidence whether that higher threshold had been met.

That was the problem then.

This filing makes it worse now.

Why? Because the challengers themselves repeatedly describe the convention action as the will of the majority of the delegates. A majority. Not two-thirds. Not a supermajority. Not a properly noticed disciplinary process with charges, notice, and a chance to be heard. Just a majority.

Well, that’s awkward.

The very people now asking the state to treat the resolution as binding have supplied language suggesting it passed by the same threshold used for ordinary business. So what was once a question mark has become something closer to an admission. If their own account is accurate, then this was not some procedurally rigorous act of party discipline. It was a majority vote dressed up after the fact as though it carried disciplinary force.

That matters because if the resolution was only an ordinary majority expression of convention anger, then it looks much less like a binding act that stripped someone of rights and much more like what it always looked like: a political tantrum with pretty stationery.

And that is before getting to the even larger problem: even a valid convention resolution is not the same thing as a legally enforceable ballot disqualification under Georgia law.

This is the part where a hearing officer should stop, put down the filing, and ask the only question that matters: where, exactly, does Georgia law say that an internal party resolution – especially one passed under dubious parliamentary circumstances – automatically renders a candidate unqualified for the ballot?

The answer, so far as these challengers seem able to show, is nowhere.

Their filing tries very hard to turn an internal party grievance into a state-law disqualification. That is a neat trick when it works.

But here it does not.

At most, the challengers may have an argument that party officers or staff acted contrary to what the convention wanted. Fine. That is an internal governance complaint. It may even be an interesting one. Take it up with the State Committee. But it does not follow that violating an internal party resolution makes a candidate legally ineligible under Georgia’s ballot challenge process.

That is the leap. That is the whole leap. And it is a canyon.

And I don’t see any Evel Knievels emerging from this crowd.

The filing papers over that canyon with a lot of constitutional rhetoric about freedom of association. Political parties certainly do have associational rights. No serious person disputes that. A party has a right to define itself and to decide who speaks in its name. But saying “freedom of association” over and over does not transform this particular resolution into a self-executing legal command. It does not make a voice-vote convention flourish into a statutory disqualification mechanism. And it does not relieve the challengers of the burden of showing that their preferred internal party outcome has actual force in the state-administered ballot challenge process.

That showing is missing.

Worse still for the challengers, their own filing relies on Robert’s Rules when it helps and ignores Robert’s Rules when it hurts. They want Robert’s Rules to prove that a resolution is a written motion and therefore binding. Fine. But if they want to live by Robert’s Rules, they also have to live by the part where depriving someone of substantial rights is not something you do casually by majority voice vote and then call it a day.

They are borrowing Robert’s Rules for muscle while dodging Robert’s Rules on threshold.

That is not legal analysis. That is buffet-style parliamentary law.

Take a helping of “binding resolution,” skip the serving tray labeled “two-thirds vote,” and hope nobody notices.

A hearing officer inclined to take the easy route out of this case would have more than enough material to do so.

Was the convention resolution adopted through procedures sufficient to impose what was effectively a disciplinary restriction on Raffensperger’s right to run as a Republican?

The challengers’ own language points to a mere majority.

Did that resolution itself create a legally enforceable ballot disqualification under Georgia law?

They have not shown that it did.

Does an alleged violation of internal party rules by officers or staff automatically mean the candidate is unqualified under the state’s qualification challenge statute?

Again, they say yes. The law does not appear to.

And that is why this case still looks less like serious legal craftsmanship and more like an effort by the Election Integrity Industrial Complex™ to keep itself entertained between outrage cycles.

None of this means delegates were not free to pass a resolution condemning Raffensperger. They were. None of this means activists are required to like him. They plainly do not. And none of this means party officers handled the fallout especially gracefully. But if the goal is to knock a statewide candidate off the ballot, one would hope for something sturdier than a procedurally shaky resolution and a challenge filing that seems to concede the vote was by “majority” rather than the stronger threshold Robert’s Rules would ordinarily demand for a disciplinary restriction.

At some point, the performance art has to give way to actual law.

This is usually the part where someone in the audience whispers that “We the people have spoken.”

Maybe so. Conventions speak all the time. They pass resolutions. They cheer. They boo. They demand things. They congratulate themselves. None of that magically converts every voice-vote outburst into a legally operative instrument that binds election officials and overrides statutory process.

A convention resolution is not a magic wand.

And this one still looks a lot more like a prop.

So here we are, months later, with the same defective paper and a new filing, trying to give it life support. But stapling a ballot challenge to a shaky resolution does not cure the original defect. It just creates a thicker stack of questionable paperwork.

The first time around, it was fair to ask whether the Raffensperger resolution was worth the paper it was printed on.

The challengers may now have answered that question themselves.

Apparently not. So they printed more paper.