Raffensperger blasts proposed rule requiring hand count of ballots at Georgia polling places
ATLANTA– Georgia’s secretary of state spoke out Thursday against changes to voting rules pending before the State Election Board, specifically rejecting a proposal to manually count ballots at polling stations on election night.
During a meeting in July, the board a proposal submitted That would require three separate poll workers to count ballots at polling stations on election night to ensure they match the number of ballots recorded by voting machines. That proposal has been made public for public comment, and the board will vote Monday on whether to adopt it.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top elections official, called the effort “misguided” and said it would delay the reporting of election results and pose risks to the chain of evidence process.
“Activists who seek to make last-minute changes to election procedures outside the legislative process undermine voter confidence and burden election officials,” Raffensperger said in a statement.
The state election board has received a raft of proposed rules in recent months, many of them from activists with ties to former President Donald Trump. Trump has continued to complain, without evidence, that widespread voter fraud cost him victory in The 2020 Georgian Presidential ElectionsTrump and his supporters have consistently criticized Raffensperger for his steadfast defense of the integrity of that election.
Three of the five members of the board of directors are Republican partisans who named and praised Trump at a campaign rally last month in Atlanta.
Fayette County Board of Elections and Voter Registration member Sharlene Alexander proposed having three poll workers manually count ballots, sorting them into stacks of 50 ballots until they are all counted and the three workers reach the same total. If that number does not match the numbers recorded in the voter registration system, electronic voting machines and scanning forms, the poll manager should determine the reason for the inconsistency and, if possible, correct it.
Alexander did not immediately respond to a voicemail, text message and email seeking comment Thursday on Raffensperger’s opposition to hand-counting ballots at polling stations.
Alexander wrote in her motion that such a manual counting of ballots was a “longstanding tradition” in Fayette County and other places. That stopped, she wrote, when Blake Evans, elections director for the secretary of state’s office, sent an email to county election officials in October 2022 telling them not to do the manual counting.
“I know many counties have received emails requesting that poll workers manually count ballots at polling places on election night. The decision to have poll workers manually count ballots at each polling place on election night is not something your poll workers should be doing,” Evans wrote in the email, which Alexander attached to her proposal.
Evans cited portions of Georgia law and state election board rules governing the processing of ballots at polling places on election night, writing that “to ensure maximum security for the ballots being voted, poll workers may not extend the process of removing ballots from ballot boxes and sealing them in shipping containers.”
In Thursday’s press release, the secretary of state called the state election board members “unelected bureaucrats who have never run an election” and said they “appear to reject the advice” of anyone who has run an election.
The council consists of five members: one appointed by the state House of Representatives, one elected by the state Senate, one each from the Republican and Democratic Parties, and an independent chairperson elected by the General Assembly or, if the General Assembly is not in session and there is a vacancy, by the governor.
Spokespeople for Gov. Brian Kemp, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and Speaker of the state House of Representatives Jon Burns did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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Associated Press editor Jeff Amy contributed reporting.