'Pure bullying': Pro-Trump election officials may pour even more chaos into Georgia vote

Right-wing election officials in Georgia have passed a series of significant changes to counting ballots in this November's elections, and they may not be finished.

The five-member state election board has adopted rules that would allow local election boards to conduct a nebulously defined "reasonable inquiry" into the voting results and allow any individual board member to "examine" all the documentation created during the election before certifying the vote, which experts say violates state law, reported The Guardian.

“State law clearly states the certification deadline," said Julie Houk, a voting rights attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. "They can add on whatever they want, but cannot go against the existing state law that says it has to be certified by a specific date."

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The changes could introduce more chaos and uncertainty into an already daunting process, which has become even more fraught since Donald Trump and his allies pressured officials in the state to overturn his 2020 election loss using tactics that a Georgia grand jury determined to be illegal.

"What’s going to happen when they have not completed a review of those thousands of records?" Houk added. "Are the board members going to say ‘we can’t certify’ even though it requires them to? What’s going to happen if certain board members or boards determine that now that we have all the records we’ve demanded, we can’t get through them in time to certify?”

Trump publicly praised the three Republicans on the board who pushed the rules, which were passed with input from the state GOP and a network of election deniers, including Fulton County commissioner Bridget Thorne, who insisted that she and other county commissioners had the authority to refuse to certify election results they suspected were inaccurate.

“One individual board member does not have authority to overrule other board members,” Thorne said. “Board members would have the right to disagree if they wanted to disagree. But hopefully by having this process in place, everyone will be confident and go ahead and certify."

The board will consider another rule next month that would require three polling precinct workers at each voting location to match hand-counted ballots to the machine count, and they will consider whether election boards must begin compiling vote totals and results before the due date for provisional ballots and military and overseas votes.

"Elections are meant to be slow and deliberate processes with a whole lot of redundancies and checkpoints," Cathy Woolard, the former chair of the Fulton Board of Registration and Elections, told Axios. "You can't just drop in new processes and think that they logically work."

Woolard has filed an ethics complaint against the three-member, right-wing majority, who she suspects have been intentionally tipping the scale for the former president and current GOP nominee.

"[Assuming positive intent] would be defining a problem very clearly, listening to the people who do the job to come up with a solution, and then being very careful about the solutions that are implemented," Woolard said. "That is not what's happening. This is pure bullying force to implement changes that no one has asked for except perhaps Donald Trump and the Republican Party."