Forty-six days before the election, Georgia’s state election board has approved a new rule requiring a hand-count of paper ballots cast on election day before tabulating votes.
The three Trump-aligned members that make up the majority on the board approved the rule that would require three people in every precinct to check machine-vote tallies by hand-counting the election results, despite a warning from the state attorney general that this rule and others in consideration “very likely exceed the board’s statutory authority”.
Chair John Fervier – an appointee of Brian Kemp, the Republican governor – and Democratic appointee Sara Tindall Ghazal voted against the new rule. “We are going against the advice of our attorney by voting in the affirmative,” said Fervier.
Voting experts have long warned that hand-counts are time-consuming, costly and less reliable than machines, but they have been favored nonetheless by conservative activists who doubt the results of the 2020 election. Advocates have warned that Georgia’s proposed rule is contrary to state law and an avenue for error.
“What we are talking about in plain terms is asking for thousands of people to handle ballots before their totals are known and were formally reported without virtually a single safeguard in place, even without considering the risk of any bad actors,” Marisa Pyle, senior democracy defense manager for All Voting Is Local, said during the public comment portion of Friday’s meeting. “Elections staff are begging you stop.”
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Donald Trump has praised the three members of the elections board who enacted the hand-count rule and other recent rules by name, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory” during a rally in Atlanta in August. Janice Johnston, an election denier and the most senior member of the bloc, attended that rally and stood up and waved to the crowd.
Also on Friday, the board temporarily rejected adopting a rule requiring daily hand counts of early voting ballots, requiring absentee ballots to be tracked through the mail and requiring local elections boards to provide a free list of voters to the public. But it did adopt new rules requiring counties to post reconciliation reports between state and local results in public and to ensure three people sign off on election night and early voting tabulations.
At one point, Johnston argued that a hand count would have minimal impact because counties take the count from the tabulation cards on election day, not the ballots themselves. Rebecca England, Greene county’s election director, passionately disagreed from a seat four rows back.
“What my county does is not what a neighboring county does,” England said. “They do not have the resources to do that. So, to say that it would not cause delays on election night is not true or accurate.”
Greene county is halfway between Atlanta and Augusta and voted for Donald Trump 2-1. Many of the elections officials attending were from small counties outside of the Atlanta metro area in Republican-dominated areas.
The board also approved a rule allowing for greater poll watcher access and considered proposed rules that would require public reports of voters who have cast a ballot during early voting and to distinguish emergency and mail-in ballots.
Chris Carr, Georgia’s attorney general, issued a letter on Thursday to inform the board that many of the proposed rules are likely illegal. A proposed rule permitting poll watchers more access would go “beyond the statutorily-designated list of places a superintendent may decide to place poll watchers”, Carr wrote, adding that if adopted, it would “very likely be subject to legal challenge as invalid”.
The five-member board has flown under the radar until recently, when a new three-member Republican bloc began pushing through a series of rule changes that many worry could slow down the certification process this fall. In recent months, it has come under intense scrutiny as it adopted new rules that allow local election board members to undertake an undefined “reasonable inquiry” before they can certify an election, and gives them the right to access unlimited documents.
The board also passed a rule that requires an explanation for any mismatch between the number of ballots cast and the number of voters who check in at a precinct. Election officials have said that those mismatches are typical and usually have benign explanations like a voter deciding not to cast a ballot after showing up at the polls.
One of the primary concerns from elections directors is about how the change in procedure would create a chain-of-custody problem in voting centers. Currently, precinct officials never touch a cast ballot. After a voter completes a ballot by touchscreen, their ballot is printed and then the voter places it in a tabulator which scans it and deposits it into a sealed box.
The rule change would have poll workers unseal that box, count ballots by hand and then return ballots to a container to be sealed again. The process introduces the potential for counting errors that would delay a count. State law – which legislators changed in 2021 – requires counties to have a complete tabulation by 11.59 on election day.
“I don’t want to set a precedent that we’re OK with speed over accuracy,” board member Janelle King said Friday. “I can guarantee to you as a voter, I would rather wait another hour to ensure that the count is accurate than to get a count or get a number within the hour and then find out at the close of an election after certification has already taken place that we have people suing because the count was not accurate.”
But Georgia state representative Saira Draper, testifying before the committee, said the board was trying to “sow chaos” before the election.
“We are setting up our counties to fail,” she said. “When these counties fail, when there are inaccuracies if there is a result of the election that some of the members of this board do not like, they will be able to point to those inaccuracies.”
During previous meetings this year, Trump-aligned activists packed the meeting hall. On Friday, much of the audience was composed of elections officials from across the state. “The world is going to hold us accountable for the decisions we make,” said Milton Kidd, elections director for Douglas county.
Before Friday’s meeting, local election officials throughout the state – and some members of the board – had urged the board to halt changing the rules around elections so close to voting, warning it would strain already resource-strapped election offices and cause confusion.
Related: How Janice Johnston is ‘laying the groundwork for chaos’ in Georgia’s elections
“Our main concerns are the timing of these rules,” said Travis Doss, executive director of the Richmond county board of elections in Augusta and the president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, which has written to the board urging it to halt changes before the election.
Mail-in ballots are set to begin going out on 7 October and early voting will begin on 15 October. Ballots to military and overseas voters are being mailed out on 21 September.
The Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican whose seat was removed from the state board by lawmakers after the 2020 election, has also condemned the changes.
“It is far too late in the election process for counties to implement new rules and procedures, and many poll workers have already completed their required training,” his office wrote in a letter to the board obtained by the New York Times earlier this week.
“If the board believes that rules changes are important for an election, the process should begin much sooner to allow for smooth implementation and training, and include the input of election officials.”
