The federal judge in Georgia whose order raised Democratic hopes in the state’s election recount shares a connection with another member of the legal community — her older sister is NPR’s longtime legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg.
U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg issued an order Monday barring Georgia’s secretary of state from certifying the results of the 2018 general election before Friday. Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor, is currently 58,150 votes behind Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state until his resignation last week and the GOP candidate.
The ruling came after a lawsuit filed by liberal pressure group Common Cause Georgia over the handling of thousands of provisional ballots cast by registered voters in the midterm elections.
In her order, Amy Totenberg said the timeline set by the Georgia secretary of state’s office for certification of election results “appears to suggest the secretary’s foregoing of its responsibility to confirm the accuracy of the results prior to final certification, including the assessment of whether serious provisional balloting count issues have been consistently and properly handled.”
Under the state’s timetable, election results were to be certified by the secretary of state Wednesday, one day after the deadline for Georgia’s 159 counties to certify their own returns.
Amy Totenberg, 67, was nominated to the U.S. district court in Atlanta by former President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate in November 2011. She donated $2,750 to Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign, according to campaign finance records.
In September, Amy Totenberg allowed Georgia to continue using its electronic voting machines, denying a request from election rights groups to bar the state from using the equipment and forcing it to use paper ballots instead.
Nina Totenberg, 74, has worked at NPR for more than 40 years. A middle sister, Jill, is a businesswoman. Their father, Roman Totenberg, was a famous concert violinist who died in 2012 at the age of 101. Nina Totenberg was married to Sen. Floyd Haskell, D-Colo., until his death in 1998. Haskell served on the board of Common Cause — the Georgia branch of which filed the lawsuit that Amy Totenberg ruled on this week.
The veteran NPR reporter has long been accused by conservatives of showing liberal bias. In 1995, she commented on Sen. Jesse Helms, a hard-line Republican from North Carolina, on air: “I think he ought to be worried about the — about what’s going on in the good Lord’s mind because if there’s retributive justice, he’ll get AIDS from a transfusion or one of his grandchildren will get it.” She later apologized and said her comments were “dumb” and “stupid.”
