In the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump lost the state of Georgia by just 0.3% of the popular vote – amounting to just under 12,000 votes. With margins this slim, many of Trump’s supporters, and Trump himself, have sought ways to overturn the results. Claims around voter fraud have been rampant in recent years, and partisan election officials who still push claims of widespread voter fraud have begun to implement changes that some believe may interfere with the electoral process.
On Sept. 20, the Georgia State Board of Elections passed a set of new rules in a 3-2 ruling. One of these rules mandates poll workers to hand count ballots. This would involve three poll workers at each station unsealing ballots and matching the number of votes to the number produced by the tabulation machine, which is currently what is used to count votes. There has been much bipartisan criticism of this rule, with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger stating that “Activists seeking to impose last-minute changes in election procedures outside of the legislative process undermine voter confidence and burden election workers.” On Oct. 22, the Georgia Supreme Court blocked the ruling, which stated that the board’s late ruling may add uncertainty and disorder to the electoral process.
Hand counting ballots is not a completely new concept to poll workers in the United States – many states already allow for this. Janelle King, a member of the Georgia State Election Board who voted in favor of the ruling, justified her support by arguing that there wouldn’t be any significant delays.
“I can guarantee you as a voter that I would rather wait another hour to ensure that the count is accurate than to get a count within that hour and then find out that we have people suing because the count was not accurate,” said King.
However, hand counts have been shown to take longer than “an hour” and tend to be less accurate than machine tabulation. While the new ruling did provide measures to ensure the accuracy of the hand counts – that is, matching it to the tabulation machine’s count – Critics have argued that the ultimate purpose of this ruling was to instill doubt in voters and sow chaos during a tumultuous election.
The election board members who voted in favor of this new rule – Janelle King, Janice Johnston, and Rick Jeffares – have each brought up their concerns about the security of the 2020 presidential election, and have all been praised by Trump as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.” Jeffares, Johnston and King also convened a meeting without the attendance of two other election board members, Sara Ghazal and Chair John Fervier, in July to pass through new election rules earlier this year. This meeting did not properly notify the public per state law, and the three members were sued by American Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog organization before the board agreed to rescind all rulings agreed upon at the meeting.
In an election as closely watched as this, delays and fears about human error or interference during hand counts could make what is expected to be a close and tense election even more inflamed.
