The Georgia State Board of Elections voted 3-2 Friday to require counties to manually count ballots cast on Election Day, a move that could significantly lengthen the time it takes to tally results in a critical swing state.
The measure, which would require poll workers to open ballot boxes and count ballots by hand at the end of the night, was endorsed by three board members who were praised by former President Donald Trump and opposed by state Democrats, as well as the Republican secretary of state and attorney general.
“I want to make it clear that we are going against the advice of our legal counsel in voting for it,” Georgia Elections Board Chairman John Fervier said before the motion was passed. Fervier, who was appointed by Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Sara Tindall Ghazal, the only Democratic appointee to the board, voted against the new rules.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had previously warned that the new rule could cause “chaos.”
“We’re looking at these major changes to the election process. I think we have a couple of concerns. One is the counting of ballots at the polls. That’s going to take time. Everything we’ve done for the last six years was to speed up the process to get the results to voters faster, and all of a sudden they’re adding something that’s actually going to take more time,” Raffensperger told NBC News on Thursday.
In a letter to the council Friday before the vote, Principal Deputy Attorney General Elizabeth Young said her office does not typically rule on election administration amendments, but was making an exception because “the proposed rules, if adopted, very likely exceed the council’s statutory authority and, in some cases, appear to conflict with laws governing the conduct of elections.”
She also argued that “generally speaking, the adoption of any rules concerning the conduct of elections is inadvisable when implemented as close to an election as the rules on the September 20 agenda.”
One of the council members who voted in favor of the new rule, Janelle King, suggested Raffensperger’s concerns were overblown.
“I don’t have those concerns at all,” King told NBC News.
“I think it will be the other way around,” she said, because “we won’t end up in a situation where candidates feel the count is wrong or want an audit because there was a problem. We would have caught the problem early.”
Hand counting has gained attention from many on the right in recent years in response to baseless claims about hacked voting machines, despite ample evidence showing that hand counting is more expensive and less accurate than using ballot tabulators.
Last year, officials in Mohave County, Arizona, tested hand-counting. They found that it took workers three minutes to count a single ballot and that they regularly made mistakes.
Georgia’s rule only requires poll workers to count the number of ballots cast — not all the votes on the ballot — but election officials still worry about the impact.
Charlotte Sosebee, elections director for Clarke County, Georgia, said counting ballots late at night could pose unforeseen problems, such as election officials disagreeing on how many ballots were included in a count.
“If we do this, are they really going to trust the process? I mean, what’s the next step?” she told NBC News.
Sosebee said she had already trained her poll workers on the issue, anticipating the rule would pass. But the extra hours of work needed to pay poll workers were not budgeted for, so the county must spend more to cover the costs.
In August, the same Georgia election board members passed other new rules that would allow county election board members to conduct “reasonable” investigations before certifying results. Critics say this could throw the election into chaos because what constitutes “reasonable investigation” is not defined and an individual board member could block certification for any reason.
The Democratic National Committee, the Georgia Democratic Party and several individuals filed a lawsuit challenging the rules last month.
Speaking of the trio of board members who voted for them at a rally last month, Trump said, “They’re on fire. They’re doing a great job.” “Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares and Janelle King, three people are all pit bulls who fight for honesty, transparency and winning,” he said.
