Georgia election board approves rules for hand-counting ballots

ATLANTA (AP) — The Georgia State Board of Elections voted Friday to approve a new rule requiring poll workers to manually count the number of paper ballots after voting is completed.

The board approved the rule against the advice of the state attorney general’s office, the secretary of state’s office and the Association of County Election Officials. Three board members who were praised by former President Donald Trump at a rally in Atlanta last month voted to approve the measure, while the board’s lone Democrat and the nonpartisan chairman voted to reject it.

In a memo sent Thursday to election board members, state Attorney General Chris Carr’s office said there is nothing in state law that allows for hand counting of ballots at the precinct level before they are sent to county election supervisors for counting. Therefore, the memo said, the rule is “not subject to any statute” and “likely to be the kind of impermissible legislation that agencies cannot do.”

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger last month called the hand-count rule “wrong” and said it would delay reporting of election results and create risks to the chain-of-custody process.

The new rules require that the number of paper ballots (not votes) at each polling station be counted by three different poll workers until the three have the same result. If there are more than 750 ballots in the scanner at the close of voting, poll administrators can decide to start counting the next day.

Voters in Georgia make their choices on a touch-screen voting machine, which then prints out a paper ballot that includes a list of choices the voter can read and a QR code that a scanner reads to count the vote.

Supporters of the new rules say they are needed to ensure that the number of ballots in the scanners at the end of the day matches the number of voters recorded by registration computers and the number of ballots recorded by voting machines and scanners. The memory cards that record ballots at polling stations are the basis for the count on election night.

During a public comment period before the vote, several county election officials opposed the rule, warning that hand-counting at polling places could delay the release of results on election night. They also worried about the extra burden it would put on poll workers who have already been working all day.

Leaders of the Georgia Association of Voter Registrars and Election Officials raised similar concerns to Raffensperger in a letter to the state election board last month, warning that the rule would ultimately undermine confidence in the electoral process. The nonprofit association’s membership includes more than 500 election officials and workers across the state, according to the group.

Janelle King, a board member who worked with the rule’s authors on the language, said she wasn’t concerned that election night coverage would be slowed by efforts to ensure accurate ballot counts.

“I don’t want to set a precedent that we value speed over accuracy,” she said as the board discussed the proposed rules. “I can assure you that as a voter, I would rather wait an extra hour to make sure the count is accurate than get the count in that hour and then find out at the end of the election, after the certification has been completed, that someone is suing us because the count was inaccurate.”

The new rules have now been submitted to the Secretary of State and will take effect in 20 days.

The commission also shelved a proposal to conduct similar counts at early in-person voting locations until 2025.

The Association of Election Officials urged the state election board in a letter Tuesday not to consider any new rules because there are less than 50 days until Election Day, ballots have already been mailed and poll worker training is well underway.

“We oppose rules not because we are lazy or because some politician or organization wants us to,” the letter reads. “We oppose rules because they are poorly written, inefficient, fail to achieve their stated goals, or simply violate state law.”