Republicans sustained two more election losses Thursday as two federal judges in Georgia—one appointed by a Republican and one by a Democrat—rejected GOP efforts to impose greater scrutiny on the state’s mail-in ballot signature verification process in advance of the Jan. 5 runoff to determine who controls the U.S. Senate.

Late Thursday in federal court in Atlanta, U.S. District Judge Eleanor Ross of the Northern District of Georgia—an appointee of President Barack Obama—ruled that a list of plaintiffs including the Georgia Republican Party, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the political campaigns of Georgia’s two Republican senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, did not have standing to sue Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger in an 11th-hour request to inject more people into the verification process of voter signatures on mail-in ballots across the state.