Georgia State Election Board approves rule requiring hand count of ballots

ATLANTA– The Georgia State Election Board voted Friday to approve a new rule that requires poll workers to manually count paper ballots after voting is complete. Critics fear the change could delay the announcement of election results on Election Night.

The council’s decision went against advice from the attorney general’s office, the secretary of state’s office and an association of county election officials. Three Republican board members who were praised by former President Donald Trump at a rally in Atlanta last month, voted in favor of the measure, while the board’s sole Democrat and its independent chair voted against it.

The State Election Board has been embroiled in controversy in recent months as it considers new rules, many of them proposed by Trump allies. Democrats, legal experts and pro-democracy advocates have raised concerns that new rules can be used by the former president and his supporters to wreak havoc in this crucial swing state and undermine public confidence in the results if he loses to Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in November.

In a memo sent to members of the Board of Elections on Thursday, the office of state Attorney General Chris Carr said there is no provision in state law that allows for the manual counting of ballots in precincts. The memo says the rule is “not bound by statute” and “likely to be the exact type of impermissible legislation that agencies cannot implement.” It warns that any rule that exceeds the board’s authority is unlikely to survive a legal challenge.

Two rules the board adopted last month regarding the certification of vote counts have already been challenged in two separate lawsuits, one filed by Democrats and the other by a conservative group. A judge has scheduled an Oct. 1 trial for the Democrats’ lawsuit.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger last month called the hand counting rule ‘misleading’, According to them, this would delay the reporting of election results and pose risks to evidentiary procedures.

The new rule requires that the number of ballots — not the number of votes — at each polling place be counted by three separate poll workers until all three counts are the same. If there are more than 750 ballots in a scanner at the end of voting, the poll manager can decide to start the count the next day.

Voters in Georgia make their selections on a touchscreen voting machine. The machine prints out a paper ballot with a human-readable list of the voter’s choices. It also prints a QR code that is read by a scanner to count the votes.

Supporters say the rule is needed to ensure that the number of paper ballots matches the electronic counts on scanners, check-in computers and voting machines. The three workers would count the ballots in stacks of 50, and the polling station manager would explain and, if possible, resolve any discrepancies and document them.

The results could be delayed if polling stations wait until the manual count is complete before sending the memory cards that record the votes in machines to the central counting location.

Several county election officials who spoke out against the rule during a public comment period ahead of the vote warned that a manual count could delay the reporting of election results. They also worried about placing an additional burden on poll workers who have already worked a long day.

Leaders of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials raised similar concerns to Raffensperger in a letter to the State Election Board last month, warning that the rule would ultimately undermine confidence in the process. The nonprofit has more than 500 election officials and employees across the state as members, according to the organization.

Janelle King, a board member who worked with the rule’s author on the wording, said she wouldn’t mind if reporting on election night were a little slower so there was more certainty about the ballot count.

“What I don’t want to do is set a precedent that we value speed over accuracy,” she said as the board debated the proposed rule, adding that she would rather wait another hour or so for results than hear about lawsuits later about inaccurate counts.

Chairman John Fervier warned that the board was acting contrary to the advice of its lawyers and may be exceeding its authority.

“This board is an administrative body. It’s not a legislative body,” he said. “If the legislature wanted this, they would have written it into law.”

Some other states already count ballots by hand at the end of the vote. Illinois has done so for decades “without any complaints about delays or any potential impact on the security of the ballots,” Matt Dietrich, a spokesman for the Illinois State Board of Elections, said in a statement. “It is designed to ensure integrity and voter confidence, and in all likelihood, it has worked.”

Guidelines from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission state that “the total number of votes cast must balance the total number of voters counted at each polling place,” but they do not require manual counting of ballots using a voting computer.

The board also shelved a proposal for similar counting at early voting sites until 2025. The board considered 11 new rules on Friday, adopting several that contained mostly minor changes and shelving a few more complicated ones.

The state election officials association urged the State Election Board in a letter Tuesday not to consider new rules until Election Day is less than 50 days away, ballots are already being mailed and training for poll workers is underway.

“We do not oppose regulations because we are lazy or because some political official or organization wants us to,” the letter reads. “We oppose regulations because they are poorly written, inefficient, would not accomplish their stated purposes, or directly conflict with state law.”

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Jeff Amy, an Associated Press editor in Atlanta, contributed reporting.