Forty-five days before U.S. elections and less than a month before early voting begins, former President Donald Trump's allies on the Georgia State Election Board on Friday passed a rule requiring county officials in the key swing state to count all ballots by hand, a move one expert said could "be exploited by election deniers" like Trump, the 2024 Republican nominee.
The board's pro-Trump majority voted 3-2 in favor of requiring hand counts, with Chair John Fervier, an Independent, casting one of the two dissenting votes.
"The overwhelming number of election officials that have reached out to me have been opposed to this," Fervier said in a statement. "There are several things that concern me about this. No. 1, I do think it's too close to the election. I do. I think that it's too late to train a lot of poll workers that have already started their training processes."
Fervier also said the board overstepped its authority by passing the new rule.
"This board is an administrative body, not a legislative body," he explained. "If the Legislature had wanted this, they would have put it in the statute. This board is not here to make law. We're here to interpret law, and I don't see any place in statute, where [it mentions] hand counting the ballots after they come out of the machines."
Sara Tindall Ghazal, the board's lone Democrat, told Mother Jones' Ari Berman that "we're so far off the deep end of sanity here."
"It's a terrible, terrible idea to do this sort of thing with no notice, no training," she added.
Berman warned that the rule change "could plunge the vote counting process into chaos and give Republicans yet another pretext not to certify the results" if Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, wins the state. He added that the new rule could even help Republicans "rig the state for Trump."
Trump, who lost Georgia to President Joe Biden by less than half a percentage point in 2020, infamously asked Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find 11,780 votes" in his favor. This prompted Democratic Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to launch an investigation that led to 13 criminal counts against Trump and numerous alleged co-conspirators for violations of the state's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act related to their participation in a sprawling "criminal enterprise" aimed at overturning the election.
In June, the Georgia Court of Appeals paused the case, in which judges have dismissed multiple counts against Trump and his co-defendants, four of whom have pleaded guilty.
Republican Georgia officials including Raffensperger and Attorney General Chris Carr have also voiced concerns about hand counts.
However, Janelle King, a board member who supports Trump, said Friday that "what I don't want to do is set a precedent that we are OK with speed over accuracy."
"By mandating hand counts that can magnify discrepancies and potentially delay results, the Georgia State Election Board has taken another dangerous step to create doubt in our election process where there should be none," Kristin Nabers, Georgia state director at the advocacy group All Voting Is Local—which warned that the board is "purposely setting up [the] system to fail"—said in a statement Friday.
"Counting thousands of ballots by hand will be an incredibly tedious, expensive, and possibly error-prone process," she continued. "Any human errors can be exploited by election deniers to sow distrust and decrease confidence in our elections and in the hard-working election officials that run them."
"Many election workers have spoken recently about the threats they are facing from the conspiracy theorists who refuse to believe that our elections are fair, and these rules just add fuel to that fire," Nabers related.
"Implementing these drastic changes less than a month before the start of early voting means counties may have to restart their training of poll workers," she added. "These unnecessary hand counts are setting the county election offices up for failure. Today, we witnessed the board allow election deniers to complicate elections in the Peach State even further with their baseless conspiracy theories."
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said that "instead of providing better access to the polls, extremists in Georgia are changing the rules just over a month before we elect new leaders."
"This new policy will only create more distrust of our safe and secure election system, burden election workers, and slow the vote count," she added.
It's not just Georgia. As Public Citizen noted Friday, "Since 2020, several states have implemented new voter restrictions to suppress turnout."
"Georgia, Texas, Montana, and Iowa have added new voter-restriction policies such as shortening early voting windows, requiring new voter registration if voters don't participate in the previous election, forbidding automatic mailing absentee ballot applications, and requiring IDs at the polls," the group noted. "States have also purged voter roles and even sued to try to prevent voter registration efforts."
In Georgia, which enacted a Republican-led voter suppression law in 2021, voters experienced a dramatic increase in mail-in ballot rejections during subsequent municipal elections.
As Common Dreams reported at the time, the law imposed strict voter identification requirements, significantly limited the use of absentee ballot drop boxes, eliminated mobile voting vans, and made it a crime to give water to people waiting in line to vote.