New election rule in Georgia: How mandating ballots being hand-counted will impact result certification

A 3-2 decision by the Georgia State Election Board has ruled that ballots be hand-counted this year after the polls close. The rules do not relate to the tallying of results. Instead, they require each polling location to count the number of ballots and compare that figure to the number that has been counted by the machines. Both Democratic and Republican officials opposed the proposal, which would make the ballot-counting process more cumbersome, expensive, and time-consuming. The Republican Attorney General and Secretary of State, tasked with ensuring the legitimacy of the state’s elections, also opposed the rules.

Bipartisan opposition to the new rules

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told NBC News that one of their central concerns revolves around how it will slow down the speed at which the state can publish the results of the election. “Everything that we’ve done for the last six years has to speed up the process to give the voters the results quicker, and all of a sudden now they’re adding an element that it’s going to take longer,” explained Raffensperger. With the change in rules coming so close to the election (early voting begins in three weeks), the state worries about the “mess” it could create as election workers will have to be trained on the new procedures and protocols.

Additionally, as reported by NPR, election experts have stated in recent years that incorporating these sorts of human ‘checks’ into the system can actually open the tabulation process up to human error, which could slow down the process even further as multiple counts may have to be conducted at polling locations across the state.

At the legal level, the Attorney General’s office made clear that if the Board approved these rules, they would not go unchallenged. A letter addressed to the Board from AG Christopher Charr argued that “if passed,” it was seen as “very likely” that they “exceed the Board’s statutory authority and in some instances appear to conflict with the statutes governing the conduct of elections.”

Donald Trump applauds the Board’s decision

Leaders like AG Carr and Secretary Raffensperger have been working to ensure that the public can trust the election process in the state after becoming embroiled in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results in 2020. Shortly after the election results in 2020 were announced, Donald Trump was recorded on a call with Secretary Raffensperger asking him to “find 11,780 votes,” which happened to be the exact figure he lost the state by.

The Trump campaign applauded the decision by the Board, highlighting the tensions between the GOP’s presidential candidate and Georgia’s GOP election officials.