Alabama Certifies Jones Win, Brushing Aside Challenge From Roy Moore

Alabama officials on Thursday unhesitatingly pushed aside a legal challenge from Roy S. Moore and certified Doug Jones as the winner of this month’s Senate election.

The action, during a brief meeting at the State Capitol, was essentially the state’s final step before the seating of the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Alabama in a quarter century. It was also a swift rejection, by some of the state’s most powerful Republicans, of Mr. Moore’s complaint that he was the victim of “systematic voter fraud.”

Mr. Jones’s margin of victory was 21,924 votes with more than 1.3 million ballots cast.

The certification leaves Mr. Moore, 70, a former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court whose campaign faltered partly because of allegations of sexual misconduct against teenage girls, with almost no avenues to derail Mr. Jones’s ascension to the Senate. The election aftermath followed a familiar pattern for Mr. Moore, who in the past has been eager to declare victories and pronounce grievances — but loath to concede defeats. To this day, Republicans note, Mr. Moore has not conceded his losses in the 2006 or 2010 Republican primaries for governor, and there is already speculation in Montgomery that he might run for governor or attorney general next year.

“You win with class, you lose with class, and he just can’t do it,” Angi Horn Stalnaker, a Republican strategist who ran campaigns, with mixed success, against Mr. Moore, said acidly.

Before the results of the Dec. 12 special election were certified, Mr. Moore and his campaign left little doubt about their assessment of the vote.

In a lawsuit filed in a state court late Wednesday, Mr. Moore, who denied the allegations of sexual impropriety, complained that pervasive fraud had tainted the election, and that the Alabama authorities had inadequately investigated potential misconduct.

But Mr. Moore found himself aligned against Democrats and Republicans alike. Secretary of State John H. Merrill, a Republican who voted for Mr. Moore, said he had found no evidence of endemic fraud and refused to postpone certification proceedings. Judge Johnny Hardwick of Montgomery County Circuit Court, citing a lack of jurisdiction, dismissed Mr. Moore’s complaint minutes before the vote was certified.

Mr. Jones, whose transition team had called the lawsuit “a desperate attempt by Roy Moore to subvert the will of the people,” said in a statement that his victory “marks a new chapter for our state and the nation.”