The latest development out of Georgia threatens to increase mistrust in the November election by imposing a new error-prone and time-consuming process to the state’s Election Day procedures. Last Friday, a partisan majority on the Georgia State Election Board approved a new rule — less than 50 days before Election Day.
It requires all precincts, as a first step in the vote tabulation process, to hand count paper ballots, compare those results to the total ballots registered by machines, and attempt to reconcile any discrepancies. Our elections are already safe, secure and accurate. Introducing hand-counting on this scale on election night does nothing to help the electoral process. In fact, studies show that machine counting is more accurate than hand counting.
Many voices on both sides of the political aisle within Georgia are opposed to this rule, including Georgia’s Republican Attorney General, who said in a public statement that the rule likely violates state law. Other election officials are saying the rule’s requirement to complete the hand count on election night, or the next day, would be physically impossible in large counties, and that there’s not enough time or money to implement this eleventh-hour rule.
CLC laid out our concerns with this proposal in letters to the Board sent mid-August and last week. These include warnings about endangering election integrity by passing ballots through multiple sets of hands during the counting process. This is not our first time dealing with this issue. CLC and our pro-democracy allies mounted a coordinated effort to oppose hand counting in Nevada in the lead-up to the 2022 midterm elections.
The truth of the matter is election administration is a highly professionalized line of work, with officials using verified, proven practices to make sure ballots are being counted accurately. Among these are regular audits to ensure vote counting machines are working properly, and full recounts in close elections (as occurred in 2020).
The nightmare scenario for this election is a razor-thin margin in Georgia where hand counting introduces human error early in the process and causes delays in final vote tallies. It’s important to see this hand-counting requirement as part of a broader effort by the Board to inject new procedures into the election process at the last minute which may create uncertainty and mistrust in election results. Just about a month ago, the Board advanced a different election rule that could allow local election officials to delay the vote certification process to review ballot questions, again creating the possibility of post-election litigation.
It is almost certain that the Georgia State Election Board’s new ballot counting rule will be challenged in court. Unfounded suspicions about the integrity of our elections must not be allowed to burden local election officials by imposing unreliable and time-consuming hand count requirements.
The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center is dedicated to advancing democracy through law at the federal, state and local levels, fighting for every American’s rights to responsive government and a fair opportunity to participate in and affect the democratic process.
