Georgia’s state board of elections voted 3-2 on Friday to require counties to count ballots by hand in this November’s election, which could dramatically extend the amount of time it takes to tally election results in the critical battleground state.
The move was approved by three former board members praised by former President Donald Trumpand state Democrats, as well as a Republican secretary of state and attorney general, opposed him.
“I want to point out that we will be going against the advice of our legal counsel by voting yes,” John Fervier, chairman of the Georgia Board of Elections, said before the motion was passed. Fervier, appointed by Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp and Sarah Tindall Ghazal, the panel’s lone Democratic appointee, voted against the new rules.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger previously warned that the new rule could create “chaos.”
“We are considering these major changes in the electoral process. I think we have a few concerns. Number one is the actual count of ballots in the precinct. This will take time. Everything we’ve done in the last six years is to speed up the process to get results to voters faster, and all of a sudden they’re adding an element that will actually take longer,” Raffensperger told NBC News. on Thursday.
Assistant Attorney General Elizabeth Young said in a letter to the board before Friday’s vote that her office typically does not consider amendments to the election administration but took exception because “the proposed rules, if adopted, are likely to be excessive. The board’s statutory powers and some in some cases, it contradicts the statute regulating the conduct of elections”.
He also claimed that “as a general matter, the adoption of any rules related to the conduct of elections is not approved when they are implemented as close to the election as the rules on the September 20 agenda.”
Janelle King, one of the board members who voted in favor of the new rule, suggested Raffensperger’s concerns were overblown.
“I don’t have that concern,” King told NBC News.
“I think it would actually be the opposite,” he said, because “we wouldn’t have a situation where any of our candidates would say the count was suspended or that they wanted a check because something went wrong. We would have caught that early on.”
Despite ample evidence that manual counting is more expensive and less accurate than using ballots, manual counting has drawn attention from many on the right in recent years in response to unsubstantiated allegations of hacked voting machines.
Last year, officials in Mohave County, Arizona, tested hand-counting ballots. They found that it took workers three minutes to count a ballot and that workers made mistakes daily.
Later, the chairman of county elections 245 people are estimated to last three weeks Counting the 105,000 ballots the county received in the 2020 election.
Georgian voters cast more than 4.9 million votes in the 2020 elections.
In August, the same members of Georgia’s board passed other new rules this will allow constituency board members to make “reasonable” inquiries before certifying the results. Critics say it could throw the election into chaos because “reasonable inquiry” is not defined and an individual board member could block certification for any reason.
Democratic National Committee, Democratic Party of Georgia and several individuals filed a lawsuit challenged the rules last month.
Speaking about the trio of board members who voted for them at last month’s rally, Trump said, “They’re on fire. They are doing a great job.” “Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares and Janelle King are three pit bulls fighting for integrity, transparency and victory,” he said.