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The Republican-controlled Georgia State Election Board has given the green light to a controversial voting measure that local officials warned against.
The new rule requires local precincts to hand count the upcoming November election results and match them to the machine counts before certifying them.
Three Trump-backed Republican members have been the majority on the board since May. They passed the measure despite being told by Republican Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr that the board would illegally be seizing the power of the state legislature, board Chair John Fervier said, according to USA Today.
“We know the legislature is not shy of passing laws,” he said. “This board needs to take seriously the guidance that we’ve received from the attorney general, from the secretary of state’s office, and from the election professionals across the state.”
Board member Janelle King supported the rule and said that Fervier was “welcoming lawsuits” which she said would be dismissed.
At a rally in Atlanta in early August, former President Donald Trump called King and her fellow members Janice Johnston and Rick Jaffares “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.”
Carr said in a Thursday letter obtained by USA Today that the new rule is “likely the precise type of impermissible legislation that agencies cannot do.”
Carr added that new rules regarding how elections are conducted “are disfavored when implemented as close to an election as the rules on the September 20 agenda.”
In total, 11 new rules were proposed on the agenda.
In a letter on Tuesday, the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, a group with more than 500 members, shared their concerns about the new proposed rules.
“Election officials are training thousands of poll workers daily across the state and are already working to educate the public on what to expect throughout the voting process and beyond,” they said. “We respectfully ask that these proposed rules, and any other petitions for rulemaking, be tabled until 2025.”
They added that they oppose the rule “because it goes against state law, will waste taxpayer money, and cannot be implemented prior to the upcoming election.”
“This rule is redundant and simply could provide the poll managers with an opportunity to make a clerical error on official paperwork,” the group said in its five-page letter.
“We continue to oppose the rules for the reasons we have previously stated including: the rule’s potential to delay results; set fatigued employees up for failure; and undermine the very confidence the rule’s author claims to seek,” they added.
King told USA Today previously that it was her job “to ensure that every vote is counted accurately and every election is conducted correctly going forward.”
Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said on Thursday that the new rule would create delays and threaten the security of paper ballots.
“Ninety days before an election, you should not institute major changes to the election process,” he said, according to USA Today. “The more moving parts you have, the more chance you have to fail.”
Board members listened to more than an hour of comments from the public during a meeting on Friday morning.
The Georgia state director for All Voting is Local, a nonpartisan voting rights organization, Kristin Nabers, said she has seen several counties do hand counts and when there’s been an error, it’s been made by a person, not a machine or been because of wrongdoing by a voter.
“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,” she said, according to USA Today.
Saira Draper, a Democratic Georgia state congresswoman said she believes counties are being set up “to fail.”
“And when these counties fail, when there are inaccuracies, if there is a result of the election that some of the members of this board do not like, they will be able to point to those inaccuracies, and they will say ... that the election is inaccurate, that there is a lack of integrity in the election,” she added.
A Republican member of the Fulton County Election Board in Atlanta, Julia Adams, who refused to certify results in the primary in May, backed the rule changes, comparing the hand-counting rule to checking cash issued by a bank.
“A machine is going to count the thousand dollars, the teller is going to hand count to make sure it’s $1,000, and you ... are going to count and make sure it’s $1,000,” Adams said on Friday.
