Georgia election officials worry a GOP-led board will OK last-minute voting changes

ATLANTA — Georgia’s State Election Board is preparing to vote on nearly a dozen rule changes Friday that could take effect before the upcoming election, concerning local officials who are training poll workers and processing absentee ballot applications.

The once-obscure state panel is already facing scrutiny for advancing a pair of rule changes in August that could disrupt the certification of election results. The moves by the board’s Republican majority have drawn praise from former President Donald Trump and pushback from Georgia’s GOP secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and other election officials.

“You can have 10 election directors stand up there and say, ‘This is bad, this is bad, this is bad.’ And then the board says, ‘I make a motion that we approve this rule,’” says Travis Doss, the elections director in Richmond County.

Among the changes up for a vote on Friday is a new requirement that a polling place’s manager and two witnesses hand-count the paper ballots in every ballot box to verify that the count matches the number of ballots recorded by voting machines.

Other proposals include adding hand counts of absentee ballots, requiring the public posting of all registered voters in the upcoming election and expanding access for poll watchers.

The Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, which represents 500 members statewide, has urged the state board to pause implementing new rules until after the election. In a letter, the association wrote that its members are “gravely concerned that dramatic changes at this stage will disrupt the preparation and training processes already in motion.”

That's something the Georgia secretary of state's office echoed in a Monday letter to the chair of the state board, with Charlene McGowan, general counsel for the secretary, citing "the absurdity of the timing of the Board’s actions."

Election officials worry about needing to retrain poll workers

In suburban Atlanta’s Gwinnett County, training for 2,000 county poll workers begins this week. Elections Director Zach Manifold says that's complicated when the rules are in flux, “especially if we have to retrain people.”

When Manifold met with his deputies back in July, they agreed that all three elections so far this year went smoothly.

“We’ve been through three elections. We’re feeling pretty good. Let’s not change anything in the next three months,” he recalls saying then. “I wish everybody had that view.”

Manifold says election officials are already contending with new election laws passed in the aftermath of the 2020 election, like a 2021 overhaul that included tighter windows on returning absentee ballots and a law passed this year tinkering with rules around mass voter challenges.

With those laws, Manifold says, election officials had more time to prepare.

Manifold says the county board is scrambling to craft a policy for adapting to the new certification rules, providing guidelines for what documents board members can ask to inspect before certification.

“You can’t just tell me on Saturday you want to see a document from all 156 precincts in Gwinnett,” Manifold says. “I can’t just pull that out and get that to you the next day.”

Certification rules draw swift backlash

The new rules seem to allow local election board members to vote against certifying an election if they report uncovering discrepancies or if they cannot examine every election record they ask for.

The trio of Republican state board members who approved the new rules say it is unfair to ask local boards to sign off on results they may have questions about.

Georgia’s secretary of state, along with most election law experts, says Georgia law does not grant local election board members this discretion. But since 2020, a growing number of local Republican board members have tested their authority in several swing states.

Each time, the courts or state officials have stepped in to compel certification, but election officials and legal experts fear even failed efforts to hold up the process could cause delays or fuel misinformation about the integrity of the results.

Some of the new rules have been crafted with the input of activists and groups that have loudly and baselessly called into question the 2020 presidential election result and have been approved by Republican board members who have also indulged or promoted conspiracy theories about election fraud.

Yet Republican board member Janelle King told reporters in August that she doesn’t make “decisions based on which side of the aisle wants me to do something. I look at the facts. I look at the evidence. I look at what’s in front of me, and I see if this is a good rule — is it going to continue to secure our elections or not.”

Two lawsuits have been filed against the certification rules. The Democratic Party of Georgia and the Democratic National Committee, with the support of the Harris campaign, brought one of the suits. The plaintiffs in another challenge include a Republican election board member in Chatham County.

A trial is scheduled for Oct. 1.

Election officials are on edge over new rules, mounting challenges

For the first time, the association of election officials hired a lobbyist to help shape the fast-changing rules and laws governing elections. But for Richmond County’s Doss, who leads the group, it increasingly seems like the people crafting those policies are more inclined to listen to activists raising doubts about election integrity than experts who have conducted elections for years.

Doss says that is one reason many veteran officials have left the field, on top of the threats, harassment and vitriol directed at them and the growing demands for ensuring security and safety at the polls.

“I’ve got about four more years until I can retire,” Doss says. “Believe me, I’ve got a countdown clock on my phone.”

In Cobb County, in metro Atlanta, election officials have ramped up training and coordination with local law enforcement. At a Cobb County Board of Elections and Registration meeting in August, one poll manager told board members that after an altercation with a voter, she realized that he had been carrying a firearm in the polling place, which is illegal.

“I have seen a rise in voters expressing both concern and resentment about problems they have been told to expect but which they haven’t actually experienced,” poll manager Susan Radulovacki told the board. “Their anger, though, is very real. It is not uncommon for them to get loud and belligerent, and then it becomes my job to defuse the situation before it explodes.”

“To be totally transparent, this idea of poll worker safety is what keeps me up at night,” Tate Fall, Cobb County’s elections director, said at the meeting. “I have seasoned poll workers who don’t want to work. I have people in the office who have worked for us for decades and they are retiring.”

In Gwinnett County, Manifold says he is aware of the various dicey scenarios that could crop up, but he is confident that his team is prepared. “If you worry and worry and worry, it will just eat you alive,” he says.

There is another reason he says people should feel assured.

“The people working your polling location are your neighbors, your teachers, your firefighters,” Manifold says. “And that makes me feel really good. At the end of the day, it really is run by your community.”

In recent cycles, however, that has not always been enough to keep the temperature down when distrust in elections among some voters runs deep.