Pro-Trump Georgia Election Board Invites Chaos With Last-Minute Change

A 3-2 Republican majority on Georgia’s State Election Board voted Friday to require local election offices to hand count the state’s millions of ballots, inviting chaos as experts warned the task would prove impossible in the state’s largest counties, which lean Democratic.

The rule was just the latest in a that hand counts of ballots are significantly less accurate than machine counts, but Republicans in several states have campaigned to ban machines or add hand-counting requirements in the wake of Trump and his allies’ lies that the machines were used to rig the 2020 election.

The rule passed Friday in Georgia states that “the process must be completed within the designated county certification period,” which occurs a week after Election Day. Speakers in opposition to Friday’s rule warned that it would be used to challenge the legitimacy of election results.

“People doing a hand count are going to make mistakes, which can then be exploited to spread lies and sow further distrust in our elections and our election officials,” said Kristin Nabers, Georgia state director of All Voting is Local, a nonpartisan voting rights organization.

Others were simply concerned that local officials had no time to prepare for the changes.

“Military ballots have already been issued,” Ethan Compton, elections supervisor in south Georgia’s Irwin County, said Friday, The Washington Post reported. “The election has begun. This is not the time to change the rules. That will only lower the integrity of our elections.”

Joseph Kirk, elections chief in Bartow County, previously told the paper the rule would “do nothing more than provide exhausted patriots with an opportunity to undermine public confidence through an honest mistake.”

The Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, a nonpartisan group whose members include election officials across the state, wrote in opposition to the hand count rule ahead of Friday’s meeting, citing its “potential to delay results; set fatigued employees up for failure; and undermine the very confidence the rule’s author claims to seek.”

The association’s president separately said members were “gravely concerned” about last-minute changes to the election rules, saying they could “ultimately lead to errors or delays in voting, which is the last thing anyone wants.”

And Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, warned Thursday that “activists seeking to impose last-minute changes in election procedures outside of the legislative process undermine voter confidence and burden election workers.”

Georgia was one of several states whose 2020 results Republicans challenged in an effort to overturn the election outcome and reverse Biden’s win; Trump faces several felony counts in Georgia and federally for his efforts to overturn those results, as do several Republicans in Georgia.