What Is Going on With Georgia’s Board of Elections?

With a population of 10.7 million, Georgia is buffeted by political crosscurrents and, once again, vulnerable to attempts at electoral manipulation. With 16 electoral votes (the same as North Carolina), it is the eighth most populous state and, of course, a battleground in the presidential election.

The state is changing quickly. Georgia went for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016 by a margin of 211,000 votes and narrowly for Joe Biden in 2020, who won by roughly 12,000. The man from Mar-a-Lago always claimed the 2020 election was stolen nationally and in Georgia specifically. He infamously beseeched Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him 11,780 votes to put him over the top, a move for which, combined with other Trump subterfuges, the Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis won a grand jury indictment against the former president. This is the state where Rudy Giuliani lurched into bankruptcy for defaming volunteer poll workers who won a $148 million judgment against him.

Georgia’s more populous counties in and surrounding Atlanta provided the big margins to elect two Democrats to the U.S. Senate, which accounts for the shift—Raphael Warnock, formerly the leading pastor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and Jon Ossoff, a Jewish American who was a documentary filmmaker before winning office.

Conversely, the state has brought us the King’s Fool, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican representative from the state’s overwhelmingly Republican north, and a popular conservative, Governor Brian Kemp, who stood up to Trump’s attempts to reverse the state’s election results in 2020. I’ve seen the state’s red side up close. A friend who owns a quail hunting plantation was an infantry officer in Vietnam. He once told me, “Jim, we could have won that war if they had let us.”

Democrats believe the fight for reproductive freedom can keep the state blue come this presidential election. Before the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overruled Roe v. Wade, Georgia permitted abortions up to 20 weeks of pregnancy. Afterward, it enacted the “heartbeat bill,” prohibiting abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, typically around six weeks of pregnancy. This bill includes exceptions in rare cases where the mother’s life is at risk, severe fetal abnormalities, and pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. Georgia permits surrogacy, but only because its courts have held women, like men, should be held to their contracts.

Amid these roiling waters, last week, the Georgia State Election Board narrowly approved a rule requiring the massive number of counties—159, to be precise, the second-highest number in the nation after Texas—to hand-count the total number of ballots this year, some five million votes. This could upend the November election by delaying the reporting of results and giving those contesting the results an additional reason to charge fraud and sue.

The board’s pro-Trump majority, by a vote of 3-2, changed the election rules despite several objections from officials, commentators, leading Republican state officials, and interested citizens.

The minority argued that the laborious hand count delays the contest, creating uncertainty, especially since it is enacted within 90 days of the election. The critics, including poll workers and election supervisors, argued that hand counts take too long, incur unnecessary expense money, and yield counting errors instead of eliminating them. (Machine counts are generally more accurate.) The Republican state attorney general, responsible for advising the board, ruled that the change was unlawful.

To complicate matters six weeks before the election, the hand count will supplement the machine count not only in each country but also in each precinct. The board does not provide guidance on resolving discrepancies in potentially thousands of precincts.

The hand count is slated to occur the night of the November election or the next day. But dozens of election officials said this would be impossible in all but the smallest counties where voting might have concluded. The principal argument against this is that the ruling is, at this juncture, a Johnny-come-lately, which would require election staff to do something for which they have not been trained and for which they have no money. Even in big counties–Imagine Fulton County, where there are almost a million registered voters–the laborious, expensive effort required for an accurate hand count.

In many cases, the polls are essentially still open when the hand count is required to begin, as mail-in ballots are still coming in. “Military ballots have already been issued,” said Ethan Compton, elections supervisor in southern Georgia’s Irwin County. “This is not the time to change the rules, said Compton, “That will only lower the integrity of our elections.”

The argument for the hand count is that it will make statewide elections secure and transparent. But the MAGA majority that took control of the board in May with the purported mission of preventing fraud and other irregularities from tainting this year’s presidential result seems to define fraud as any electoral decision against Trump. All three voting for the rules are Trump supporters, and the state’s leading proponents of the Big Lie that Biden stole the state’s electoral votes are also pushing the hand count.

Among those voting in favor, Janice Johnston said making sure the number of ballots cast is equal to the number of votes logged by the machines will be established as early as possible so that any discrepancies can be investigated. Actually, the potential “discrepancies” will be found later rather than sooner.

“It’s better to do it at the beginning than to try to do it at the end when you don’t have a remedy if there’s a miscount,” she said.

One of the proposers of the hand count, Sharlene Alexander of Fayette County, told the state board that the rule only requires tallying the number of ballots—to make sure the count matches the machine totals—but it does not require hand tabulation of how people voted.

However, it is incontestable that election offices are still saddled with an unnecessary burden, which would leave the presidential contest in shambles.

And then there is litigation. A federal court precedent recommends a 90-day “quiet period” ahead of elections, during which it is widely considered imprudent to change the rules because of the risk of confusion, error, and insufficient training. Anti-hand ballot forces can rely on the precedent to press their claims, or if the 2000 Florida recount is any guide, attorneys for the same campaign can argue opposite points in different counties, depending on what gives them an advantage. The George W. Bush team were masters at this.

Others warned that, besides the expense and logistical problems of a statewide hand count, requiring poll workers to handle ballots, in some cases multiple times where they find errors, injects a security risk into the otherwise strict chain-of-custody rules surrounding ballot handling.

Saira Draper, a Democratic member of the state legislature and election lawyer from DeKalb County, made an overwhelming case at the board hearing.

“It makes me question whether members of this board are operating in good faith,” Draper said. “Putting 11, maybe 12 new rules into play days before Election Day is a gift. We are setting up our counties to fail. Why do we know they are going to fail? Because they are telling you that.”

Democrats have sued over a rule passed earlier this year that could allow counties to delay certification. A hearing is scheduled for October 1. More litigation is expected.

It has been shown time and again that hand-counting ballots is less accurate than machine tallies and that it can take days, weeks, or months, depending on the size of the jurisdiction.

Most jurisdictions already audit election results by hand-counting a random sample of ballots and comparing the results with machine tallies rather than the exhaustive work of tabulating each and every vote manually. This sampling occurs after unofficial results have been reported, encouraging confidence in the result without the need for total population counting.

Earlier this year, the board passed a rule that critics say could empower county boards to delay certification of results. The rule allows the boards to demand “reasonable inquiries” if they have questions about an election’s outcome.

In a presidential election, the calendar for determining which presidential electors will convene and send their votes to Washington is immutable, with delays in concluding the count potentially derailing the process. This year, electors are due to convene in every state on December 17, a dress rehearsal for counting electoral votes in Washington on January 6, 2025.

Republican Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr’s office also weighed in on Thursday with a formal analysis of the proposal, stating that state law does not permit hand-counting ballots at the precinct level.

Board chairman John Fervier, a Republican appointed by Governor Kemp, voted against the proposal and said he thinks the rule puts the board in legal jeopardy.

The partisan slant of the elections board has upset not only Democratic democracy advocates but also Secretary of State Raffensperger, hailed for his courage in 2020 standing up to Trump, who sent a sizzling letter to the panel denouncing the rules being considered, including one that would require changes to absentee and provisional ballots.

“To underscore the absurdity of the timing of the Board’s actions,” wrote Raffensperger’s general counsel, Charlene McGowan, “[the ballots] have already been printed, and counties will have already begun mailing absentee ballots to voters before any rule change would take effect.”

She added: “It is impossible to implement this change for 2024.”

Former Georgia Republican Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, who has endorsed Kamala Harris for president, was firm in his condemnation: “These guys aren’t interested in winning this election fair and square, and that’s by putting a good candidate forward that can actually win…The only time a Republican loses in Georgia is when Donald Trump puts his fingers on him.”

And Trump, exhilarated by the prospect of manipulating the Georgia outcome, mentioned the three majority members by name at an Atlanta rally as though they were Horsemen of the Apocalypse, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.”

He’s right that they are pit bulls. On Tuesday, the board voted to investigate how eight counties—including Democratic DeKalb and Fulton—handled thousands of voter registration challenges launched by Republicans.

Trump has repeatedly declined to say he will accept the results of the 2024 election and has complained of Democratic “interference,” saying he believes the only way he can lose is if the other side cheats.

He ought to know. With him, it’s “heads I win, tails you lose.” 

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